MOOCs and Discussion Fora

As I begin to better understand MOOCs as an educational vehicle I am still confused as to the usefulness of the Discussion Fora. I believe it is a generational thing. Coursera appears to be giving the option to pay to belong to a TA interactive Forum. Perhaps there is value in such for some.

But I have made a few observations:

1. It is cultural. There is a class of participants who appear to like to "hear" themselves on such a vehicle by posting everywhere and commenting on everything. It is not clear that they are even taking the course.

2. Some questions are purely administrative or are of the type that a reasonable Professor would just blow off. It is a student who has no judgment or experience and is asking ceaseless trivia.

3. Some seem to be professing how well they are doing. Just why I want to know that so and so got a 95 is uncertain.

The list could go on. A recent study has indicated that perhaps there is a bigger problem. They conclude:

The larger goal behind our two main research questions is to improve the quality of learning via the online discussion forums, namely by (1) sustaining forum activities and (2) enhancing the personalized learning experience. This paper makes a step towards achieving these end-goals by relying on an extensive empirical dataset that allows us to understand current user behavior as well as factors that could potentially change the current user behavior. We showed, for example, that the teaching sta 's active participation in the discussion increases the discussion volume but does not slow down the decline in participation. We also presented two proof-of-concept algorithms for keyword extraction and relevance-ranking to remedy the information overload problem, both of which are demonstrated to be e ffective. Devising eff ective strategies to reduce the decline of participation in the online discussion forums is the main open problem to be addressed next.

 Specifically usage of Discussion groups seems to collapse. My view is that they seem to linger with just a few making any comments except the classes as above. The problem is the structure of the way it is done. I do not have any suggestion other than to say that what is done now just does not work.