Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 40

They were actively using the MOOC platform to try out new ideas that they would
not have been able to use before, peer grading and quiz tools in particular. It was
noted by Case Study 2 and Case study 3 that the use of peer –grading (a built in
tool within the Coursera platform) gave the opportunity to learn by marking. Case
study 3 had a positive experience in that students learnt new ways of resolving a
problem through seeing how their peers had answered it. In some instances
student performance was also improved.
“Some of the lectures that were social philosophers, political economists,
sociology. Students might find the reading very difficult if they are new to that kind of
reading… this year it was quite clear that having the opportunity to look at those
lectures and kind of replay them and review parts of those they did a lot better
writing about those authors this year than they had done previously, so that was
very successful. They did well enough that it was pretty clear that it was the change
in format and it wasn't just a kind of normal improvement or fluctuation in students’
performance from one year to another.” (Case Study 1b, Himpele).
This example of student performance improvement is consistent with student
performance on MITx 6.002x MOOC where students at San Jose State scored
higher when they were taught using the flipped classroom format (compared to
results from the previous year) (Mitros, Afridi, Sussman, White, Fischer, & Arwal,
2013).
In Case study 2, however, it was noted that the students performance was marred
by their lack of understanding of the value of these teaching methods. Again, this
has also be found to be the case in contemporary xMOOC research (Mitros et al,
2013).

5.5.2 SUPPORT
This theme covers pedagogy and the practice of learning for the students on
campus and the academics involved. Part of this applies to the techniques
employed within their classrooms to facilitate learning a constructivist way (Crotty,
1998). Although these are xMOOCs, within the design of their courses there seems
to be a range of constructivist approaches enabling supportive learning
environments (course structure). This is enabled by blen YX\