Record: Yin Yin, Catherine Adams, Erika Goble, and Luis Francisco Vargas Madriz, “A classroom at home: children and the lived world of MOOCs” in Educational Media International 52, no. 2 (2015): 88-99. [Abstract]
Summary: Yin, Adams, Goble, and Vargas Madriz are from the University of Alberta‘s Faculty of Education. In this study they qualitatively examine the experiences of children who participate in massive open online courses (MOOCs).
There is evidence that a large number of young people are taking advantage of MOOCs. People under 20 constituted 13% of the population in one study on MOOCs (with some participants under 10), and another study found that high schoolers account for nearly 150,000 of the three million students enrolled in edX courses. Several reasons that these students have for pursuing MOOCs are as part of existing K-12 classes, as preparation for college, for general interest, or as part of a homeschool curriculum. MOOCs offer a number of possibilities to students, but they also pose challenges. For example, MOOCs have extremely low completion rates, and evidence indicates that only the most motivated students are successful in them.
The authors interviewed 12 child-parent combos from across the world. The interviews ranged from 1 to 1.5 hours in length. To participate, the child needed to be under 18 years old and to have successfully completed all the quizzes in Dino 101, a MOOC by the University of Alberta.
The children’s experiences with MOOCs can be broken down into five broad findings:
- Video lectures are devoid of relational significance: Video lectures are important for MOOCs. While some adults find that the video lectures create an intimate, tutorial atmosphere, children may not find the teacher presence in video lectures to be very meaningful.
- Video lectures are just like watching a DVD: Children compared the Dino 101 video lectures to the educational DVDs and television programs with which they grew up. The authors conjecture that viewing video lectures as they would DVDs may impact engagement. On one hand, people are often drawn into movies. However, engagement with DVDs is always from a distance.
- Video lectures can be a social experience for children: Parents sometimes watched the video lectures with their children and made the content more personal through shared discussions.
- Children may see things in a MOOC than adults may not: Children appeared to value the interactive elements of Dino 101 like a “3D Fossil Viewer” to a greater extent than the adult participants in their previous study.
- Children play with their MOOCs: The Dino 101 course has questions that pop up during the video lectures. While some adults skipped them, the children found them engaging and took them as an extra challenge. In general, they also played with and took joy in things that the adults generally passed over.
Appraisal: As more and more homeschooling children pursue online education, it is helpful to have this study as an introduction to the way that homeschoolers, and other children, are using MOOCs. At this point, MOOCs do not appear to be a valid educational choice for children who are not extremely self-motivated, but perhaps by taking the observations in this study into account MOOC creators might create MOOCs that are more suited to the tendencies of children.
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