Abstract

Massive online open courses (MOOC) are one of the widely used groups of online education and have been thought of as a key factor in future education. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in MOOC from education and information systems researchers. In this paper, the aim is to observe MOOC in their natural setting to examine a particular community of MOOC by drawing on the concepts of communities of practice as a theoretical lens. One of the most significant current discussions on MOOC is Coursera. Questions have been raised about the structure of an emergent type of community within MOOC. However, far too little attention has been paid to study community of practice in this type of online education. The authors conducted an online ethnographic study on a sample of discussion forums of Coursera. Discussions were qualitatively content analyzed in order to understand the structure of an emergent type of community within MOOC. Our findings suggest that cohesion in a MOOC community is brought about by the domain of doubts, questions, new knowledge, experiences and the community of learners who meet people around the world with similar interests; the practices of documents, information, ideas, stories, experiences and software sharing. The combination of forces for MOOC community are global, free and online education identity of community which provides great materials, top professors, mass participation and certificates from top universities; voting system for warrant; movement of new comers from peripheral to the core of community by contributing more in discussions.

Download

Share

COinS