Adding meaningful connections to open online courses

A spotlight on Open Online Study Group, a 2018 Global Sprint project

Dilrukshi Gamage (@Dilrukshi_ISaC) is PhD student at University of Moratuwa researching on how can we build effective learning system for large scale of students. Hasara Maithree (@HasaraMaithree) is an undergraduate of department of Computer Science and Engineering of University of Moratuwa. Mark Whiting (@markwhiting) is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford in the HCI group in Computer Science. Together, Dilrukshi, Hasara and Mark were select to join the current round of Mozilla Open Leaders with their project, Open Online Study Group.

I interviewed Dilrukshi, Hasara & Mark to learn more about Open Online Study Group and how you can help at the Mozilla’s Global Sprint 2018.

What is Open Online Study Group?

We are building a way for people to connect meaningfully around classes they take in open online courses. We are open because we want to engage the wider community to make sure this is as good as possible and broadly accessible.

Why did you start Open Online Study Group?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are “open” yet are they really open for interactions and do they let students collaborate? We realized that the need was solvable through better social tools and scaffolds. So, we saw a need — Open online courses are often lacking meaningful social interactions between peers and at the same time course instructors and students often had weak interactions. Students often lose focus due to the lack of interaction.

What have you learned so far about making MOOCs more effective?

For the past few years we have been participating in MOOCs from many platforms such as Coursera, edX, Futurelearn etc. We deliberately interacted with and interviewed many participants to understand their perspective of MOOCs and to understand the gaps. In time, we understood that MOOCs are focusing more on content and delivery and less attention has been given to the participants’ needs. Participants mostly browse content and rarely feel really engaged in the course as they would in a real world classroom.

Today, learners are mostly isolated from interactions and meaningful collaborations rarely take place. This is mainly due to the design and the culture created in the platforms which is less supportive of their needs. We are building a platform with a culture of active interactions and collaborations.

How will doing this research openly help you?

We are doing this openly because we want to engage a diverse set of participants from around the globe, specifically because that will be the best way to make a platform like this work well.

Designing and implementing this platform openly with the community will lead to an effective and active learning community, because we are building with the community for the community.

We see the challenges that closed platforms have faced, e.g. focus on more business goals than community goals, larger social networks without meaningful interactions, and we’d like to do focus on community of online learners and build a meaningful effective and active online learning culture.

What is the story behind your team?

Dilrukshi a serial MOOCer and PhD student exploring MOOCs. She lives Sri Lanka and found about the Mozilla Open Leaders program online and invited Mark and Hasara to join in. Mark is a postdoc at Stanford whom she met during a worldwide corwdsourcing project. Hasara is an undergraduate student in Sri Lanka and a mentee of Dilrukshi. Together the 3 of them, brainstormed, designed and sketched the initial plans for this project having a common passion to improve interactivity in MOOCs or large scale learning.

What challenges have you faced working on this project?

We are distributed, and that sometimes makes things hard. Especially when there’s inconsistent internet access in some parts of the world :-)

What kind of skills do I need to help you?

If any of you have been learning online or plan to learn online, then we need your input, ideas, and perspective. That may not be considered as skill but your experience is invaluable for us.

Other than that, in particular we are seeking technical support to help us develop plugins for a community building platform, Discourse, and maintain the setup that we have. We are also seeking non-technical support in building strategies for our rollout and active community leaders for the platform.

How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?

Get involved by checking out our MozSprint 2018 listing. Joint our community, find issues that you can help with and start working on them. Feel free to talk with us about them on discourse. Jump in and start contributing right away with our open issues, e.g. help us develop group guidelines, or help us prototype interaction designs.

What meme or gif best represents your project?

Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today