DANCE Talk: Avenues for underrepresented learners in MOOCs

The sixth talk in our DANCE talk series will be given by Amy Ogan and Jessica Hammer. They will be speaking about "Avenues for underrepresented learners in MOOCs".
As usual, you will have the opportunity to submit questions during the talk that will be discussed with the speaker after the presentation.

Abstract:
Although xMOOCs are not designed to directly engage students via social media platforms, some students in these courses are choosing to join MOOC-associated Facebook groups. We present our foundational work that suggests that learners from underrepresented groups may encounter challenges with connecting with anonymous peer learners on MOOC forums, and thus turn to other sources of support. Our subsequent study explores the prevalence of Facebook groups associated with courses from MITx and HarvardX, and investigates whether the geographic representation of MOOC-associated groups is different from that of courses at large, as well as the extent to which MOOC-associated Facebook groups are location and/or language homophilous. Results suggests that a non-trivial number of MOOC students are engaging in Facebook groups, with higher representation from learners of non-English speaking countries, and evidence of location and language homophily within these groups. These findings have implications for how MOOCs and social media platforms can better serve specific groups of learners and enable enriching personalized learning experiences.