{"id":8485,"date":"2020-06-15T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-15T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/no-single-solution-helps-all-students-complete-moocs\/"},"modified":"2020-06-15T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-15T19:00:00","slug":"no-single-solution-helps-all-students-complete-moocs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/no-single-solution-helps-all-students-complete-moocs\/","title":{"rendered":"#No single solution helps all students complete MOOCs"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#No single solution helps all students complete MOOCs<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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In one of the largest educational field experiments ever conducted, a team co-led by a Cornell researcher found that promising interventions to help students complete online courses were not effective on a massive scale\u2014suggesting that targeted solutions are needed to help students in different circumstances or locations.<\/p>\n

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Researchers tracked 250,000 students from nearly every country in 250 massive open online courses (MOOCs) over 2 1\/2 years in the study, “Scaling Up Behavioral Science<\/a> Interventions in Online Education,” published June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>.<\/p>\n

“Behavioral interventions are not a silver bullet,” said Rene Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science and co-lead author.
\n“Earlier studies showed that short, light-touch interventions at the beginning of a few select courses can increase persistence and completion rates,” he said. “But when scaled up to over 250 different courses and a quarter of a million students, the intervention effects were an order of magnitude smaller.”
\nThe study was co-led by Justin Reich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a> and Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London. The research was conducted on the edX and Open edX platforms, and edX has engaged in work to make the data available to institutional researchers to advance educational science at scale.
\nThe 250 courses the researchers studied came from Harvard University, MIT and Stanford University.
\nFailure to complete online courses is a well-known and long-standing obstacle to virtual learning, particularly among disadvantaged communities and in developing nations\u2014where online education can be a key path to social<\/a> advancement. The findings have added relevance with so much education around the world taking place online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
\n“My advice to instructors is to understand and address the specific challenges in their learning environment,” Kizilcec said. “If students have issues with their internet connection, you can’t help them overcome them with a self-regulation intervention. But if students need to go to bed on time in order to be awake for a morning lecture, or they need to plan ahead for when to start working on homework in order to have it ready to hand in, then a brief self-regulation intervention can in fact help students overcome these obstacles.”<\/p>\n

Previous, smaller-scale research, performed by Kizilcec and his co-authors as well as other scholars, found that goal-setting interventions such as writing out a list of intentions at the start of the class improved students’ course completion rates.
\nIn this study, the researchers explored the effects of four interventions:<\/p>\n