From Insights to Interventions: Informed Design of Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange

Despite studies showing collaboration to be beneficial both in terms of student satisfaction and learning, isolation is the norm in MOOCs. Two problems limiting the success of collaboration in MOOCs are the lack of support for team formation and structured collaboration support. Lack of support and strategies for team formation prevents teams from being set up for success from the beginning. Lack of structured support during synchronous collaboration has been demonstrated to produce significantly less learning than supported collaboration. This paper describes a deliberation based team formation approach and a scripted collaboration framework for MOOCs aimed at addressing these problems under the umbrella of Discussion Affordances for Natural Collaborative Exchange (DANCE) whose overarching focus is the enhancement of team-based MOOCs. These two examples of current work have been used as illustrations of insights informing interventions in MOOCs.