Together we learn better: leveraging communities of practice for MOOC learners

TL;DR

This paper introduces PeerCollab, a web platform designed to foster communities and meaningful peer interactions among MOOC learners, addressing feelings of isolation and enhancing social presence within online courses.

Contribution

The paper presents PeerCollab, a novel platform that facilitates community building and peer interactions, supported by a field study and controlled experiment demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

PeerCollab fosters a sense of belonging among learners.

Learners develop close-knit learning circles through the platform.

The platform enhances meaningful peer interactions in MOOCs.

Abstract

MOOC participants often feel isolated and disconnected from their peers. Navigating meaningful peer interactions, generating a sense of belonging, and achieving social presence are all major challenges for MOOC platforms. MOOC users often rely on external social platforms for such connection and peer interaction, however, off-platform networking often distracts participants from their learning. With the intention of resolving this issue, we introduce PeerCollab, a web-based platform that provides affordances to create communities and supports meaningful peer interactions, building close-knit groups of learners. We present an initial evaluation through a field study (n=56) over 6 weeks and a controlled experiment (n=22). The result indicates insights on how learners build a sense of belonging and develop peer interactions leading to close-knit learning circles. We find that PeerCollab can provide more meaningful interactions and create a community to bring a culture of social learning to decentralized, and isolated MOOC learners.