ANYWHERE AND ANYTIME? AN ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF MOBILE DEVICES IN MOOCS

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have spread tremendously over the past years and an increasing amount of universities and companies are joining MOOC repositories such as Coursera and edX to provide global access to their courses. A promise of MOOCs is to enable people to learn at all times and anywhere, but it remains to be seen whether this promise will be fulfilled as so far, MOOCs appear to have mostly benefited well-educated residents of developed countries. The emergence of MOOCs is paralleled with the growing impact of mobile computing device the contemporary educational discourse. Mobile computing devices are expected to facilitate learning as they allow more flexible and wider access to content, can provide highly individualised and situated learning activities and feedback and connect with other technological innovations with an profound impact on education in the knowledge age such as social media. It does therefore not surprise that MOOCs are increasingly available on mobile devices. While all large MOOC repositories started as websites that function optimally on desktop computers and laptops, they nowadays provide access to their platforms via mobile applications. Initially, the apps enabled learners mainly to watch course videos via mobile phones and tablets, but over time, more and more interactive components are added to the mobile app's functionality. Both MOOCs and mobile learning present opportunities, but also challenges that educational research can help addressing. Existing research despite on mobile learning focusses mainly on effectiveness and mobile learning system design with surveys and experiments as the primary research methods. Surprisingly, no research has studied at the usage of mobile devices for MOOC learning yet. Accordingly, this paper presents the first study to close this gap. We examine the use of mobile computing devices and its effects on learning in eight MOOCs. The courses were produced by Chalmers University of Technology, hosted on the edx platform and had several thousands of learners enrolled. The MOOCs covered a broad range of themes on introductory, intermediate and advanced level. The primary method of data collection was the use of click-stream and performance data provided by the edx analytics platform and the edx data pipeline. We analyse how learners accessed and watched video lectures of the MOOCs and whether there are differences between different backgrounds of learners. First results show that only about on tenth of all learners access course content via mobile devices and that there are significant geographical differences in behaviour patterns. In the article we further show how the use of the mobile application affected the learners' performance and discuss implications for the further development and use of MOOCs as global educational resource.