How to Improve the Students' Participation and Performance in MOOCs: Lessons from BOOC

In recent years, MOOCs(Massive Open Online Courses) has been at the center of discussions. MOOC provides us with many free high-quality courses from famous universities, thus attracts large numbers of learners around the world. Nonetheless, MOOC's shortcomings such as lack of interaction and support for students result in high drop-out rates of students, out-of-date teaching and learning method, and over simplified learning assessment methods. Currently, many of the MOOCs provide thousands of participants with static content. How to promote the interaction among the students and instructor and facilitate learning assessment in an open context become a critical issue. In order to solve these problems, Daniel Hickey and his team from Indiana University Bloomington has proposed BOOC(Big Open Online Course), which focuses on promoting participation and assessment. BOOC is based on the graduate-level Assessment in Education course that Daniel Hickey has been teaching since 2009using OnCourse, Indiana's instantiation of the Sakai CMS. Starting with a big(rather than massive) course will make it possible to translate and enhance existing course features that have proven to efficiently fostering productive disciplinary engagement, while also delivering valid evidence of achievement. These features(i) have been used successfully by another instructor in a120-student undergrad telecom course,(ii) were finalists in the2011Sakai Teaching with Innovation awards,(iii) are now being vetted via scholarly peer review,(iv) can be enhanced with synchronous interaction in Google+, and(v) should be massively scalable. BOOC is organized around wikifolios. These are weekly assignments to articulate how "big ideas" of assessment take on new meaning in different contexts. Each participant first defines a particular lesson that typifies his teaching context. Participants are organized into subject-specific networking groups based on their contexts. Each week, they discuss, modify, and/ or create assessments for that lesson, and articulate which of the "big ideas" are most relevant and least relevant to that context. These public artifacts invite participants to borrow ideas within and across groups; the personalized contexts require participants to reframe those ideas to use them. Rather than considering concepts and skills in abstract and learning them as declarative and procedural knowledge, participants consider their "relative relevance" and learn them as contextual knowledge. It is rooted in the situative theory which assumes that disciplinary knowledge takes most of its meaning from the context where it is learned, used and practiced. In this BOOC course, they combine peer assessment, formative assessment and summative assessment to assess learning. These peer-awarded stamps can be paired with instructor-awarded digital badges to efficiently monitor and promote disciplinary engagement. Based on the learning analysis of the case course, this article introduces twelve features of BOOC that can be concluded to three types, participation promotion, effective learning, and learning assessment. We hope this research could provide enlightenment and reference for the design and development of large scale open courses.