BCC: Organizing Multi-Disciplinary Communities to Conduct Data-Intensive Research on Education and Learning

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The PIs of this project are building the capacity for research within the data-intensive environments of massive open online courses. The PIs are using as an organizing example the World Education Portals (WEPS) massive open online course (MOOC) that focuses on calculus and has been taught through Florida State University and the University of Helsinki for over 8 years. The PIs are building a community of researchers who are studying ways to improve student achievement measures, pedagogical aspects and the extensions to mobile platforms. A specific set of research foci for this community include the elements of design-based experimentation in MOOCs, motivational and affective aspects that can be studied within such environments, the development of new statistical and analytics methods, ethical issues that surround access to data elements, and economic aspects of MOOCs. Multiple workshops bring the community together, and Mendeley.com (an academic social network) is being used to coordinate the growing research agendas around MOOCs in the time between the workshops. The project also includes an invitational conference to organize participant papers for a set of proceedings and reports. This project builds on work that was funded as part of a suite of projects collaborating virtually with institutes of higher education in Finland. The project provides a vehicle to move the development and initial research on MOOCs to a wider community. The project leverages individuals who are experts in mathematics learning together with experts in analytics and educational data mining to provide a deep connection to learning in the MOOC virtual learning environments. A criticism of the learning analytics and educational data mining research agenda is that a focus of the deep learning about STEM content is not well represented in the research and development community. Too frequently, the focus is on the technical development of the infrastructure and the statistical processes that are necessary to analyze the large amounts of data. What has been missing from the research agenda is the focus on how students are learning in MOOCs and what aspects of the learning environments are supporting that learning. This study brings the connection of the study of the learning of mathematics into the analysis of the adequacy of the MOOC learning environment.