Learning experience interaction (LxI): Pedagogy for peer-connect in MOOCs

Massive open online course (MOOC) platforms have been found to be a desirable mode for Teacher Professional Development (TPD) activities as it allows increased opportunities to connect teachers engaged in PD. This connect allows teachers to engage in collaboration, share knowledge, discuss concepts and techniques, suggest application and additional learning material. In the MOOC setting, we term this as peer-connect. Every MOOC designer tries to increase the peer-connect through various channels available in MOOC, especially discussion forums. However, discussions in the MOOC forums have been criticized for being scattered, tentative and engaging only few learners. Existing attempts in improving the method of forum design were found to have mixed results. In this paper, we present a pedagogy designed around the discussion forum aimed at leveraging peer-learning in a 6-week TPD MOOC. The pedagogy is named as 'Learning experience Interaction' (LxI) and contains a focus question driving a discussion thread followed by a reflection quiz on the discussion to incentivize the participation. The effect of this pedagogy was analyzed through a mixed-methods research, wherein we obtained quantitative and qualitative analyses of the peer-connect and engagement of participants in the discussion forum. The results show a sustained engagement of learners in the discussion forum even after the course duration. A total of 1691 participants were active in the discussion forum and they generated a total of 29355 posts across 8 weeks. Qualitative analysis of the most active discussion thread in a week revealed that there were five different levels of interactions - Opinionated elaboration, Elaboration, Superficial, Persistent interaction, and Asking information. Majority (73.2%) of these discussions went beyond being superficial comments, and none of these deviated from the focus question.