Abstract:

The University of Tartu started conducting Estonian‐language Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) about programming in 2014 with the first one named "About programming". This MOOC was unique in Estonia due to the fact that the participants could in addition to the forums also turn to a helpdesk via e-mail for help. As the helpdesk proved to be a successful way to solve several problems that occurred, it also was time-consuming and costly for the organisers. So, there is a need to apply existing support mechanisms more effectively.

In this article, we give an overview of the usage of forums in the MOOC „About programming“. The data was collected from 1,792 participants attending the MOOC in October 2016. The final sample consisted of 937 participants (58% male and 42% female), who filled the post-questionnaire, which was 52.3% of the registered users. The average age was 34.40 (SD = 9.96). The data consisted of forum observations and the answers of the post-questionnaire belonging to the course. During the forum observation, several information regarding submitting a post were registered (for instance name of the user, the content of the post, date, time, and the week of the forum post). The gathered forum posts were coded, divided into seven categories by their content:
(1) question (regarding programming),
(2) answer (regarding programming),
(3) issue (organisational, technical, notice, interest),
(4) issue resolution,
(5) acknowledgments (positive and negative),
(6) submission of full solution, and
(7) other and analysed via quantitative content analysis.

Each forum post could only belong to one category, and the category was selected based on the cause which prompted the participant to post to the forum. In the post-questionnaire, several questions regarding the usage of forums (reading or/and posting, writing a question or/and answering etc.) were posed and analysed using quantitative methods.

The results revealed that forums are more of a question-answer environment with a rather small amount of participants. Answers to programming questions and programming problem solutions were the content of most of the forum posts (excl. other). The posting in forums decreased every week about 7.2%. The results revealed also that the participants posted in the forums during the course preferably only once. In the study, we were able to differentiate several types of participants posting in forums (active users, passive users, and non-users) according to their posting in forums, but also taken into account the self-reported post-questionnaire. There was a significant difference found in the age distribution regarding the type of forum activity. The active users are older than passive users and non-users overall. The study also revealed that the active users tend to complete the course more likely than the passive users and non-users. A significant difference in the usage of forums was found between the active and passive forum users, but also between the active users and non-users. A numerous amount of participants stated that they did not use the forums for help because they managed to complete the course without help. Others didn’t post in forums because they already got the help they needed from other forum posts.

Keywords:

Massive Open Online Course, MOOC, programming, discussion forum.