Facilitating Students' Interaction in MOOCs through Timeline-Anchored Discussion.

Interaction is central to any learning experience. Currently, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) rely on discussion forums as a primary means of interaction among learners and instructors. Threaded discussions of such forums help learners to hold an ongoing and recursive discussion over an extended period, but the lack of temporal and spatial contiguity makes it insufficient to deliver a smooth interaction experience. To facilitate such interaction, this study designed DanMOOC, a commenting tool that facilitates timeline-anchored discussion among MOOC learners and instructors. DanMOOC was the first to combine threaded discussions with Danmaku commenting, a video commenting feature that allows viewers of the same video to share comments at the top of the video screen. The design process followed an iterative process of user-centered design. The impact of the new design on learning was assessed empirically through a laboratory experiment comparing DanMOOC with the current MOOC system (video-based learning + forum). The results show that DanMOOC increases learners' perceptions of social, teaching, and cognitive presence, engages learners more in discussion, and improves learners' satisfaction with both the course and the platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]