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Abstract
The current discourse surrounding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is powerful. Despite their rapid and widespread deployment, research has yet to confirm or refute some of the bold claims rationalizing the popularity and efficacy of these large-scale virtual learning environments. Also, MOOCs’ reputed disruptive, game-changing potential for education remains unsubstantiated. A sober counterbalance is needed, in particular, via attending to students’ everyday accounts of the complex realities of learning in these massive online courses. This article reports on an exploratory, phenomenological study of the xMOOC learning experience. Our interest was not the xMOOC experience of students in general, but in its singular, lived particularities. What we discovered was a unique and intimate tutorial sphere that seemed to develop for some xMOOC students in the context of the video lectures, an experience sometimes marked by a sense of fandom surround.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education Support for the Advancement of Scholarship (SAS) Fund and a Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Student Researcher Award.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 Networked Learning Conference, Edinburgh.
2. Quotes represent material collected during interviews with MOOC completers and/or via solicited written experiential descriptions as part of a [university]-funded research project. Interviews were conducted either in person or via Skype. All names are pseudonyms. All data collection adhered to the guidelines set by the “Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.”
3. Because of the open and public nature of MOOCs, we credit the instructor and the name of the MOOC where applicable. Otherwise, pseudonyms have been employed as noted immediately above.