Unfolding online learning behavioral patterns and their temporal changes of college students in SPOCs

ABSTRACT

The emergence of massive open online courses not only changes the ecology of higher education, but also facilitates a blending learning paradigm, also known as small private online courses (SPOCs). In order to understand how college students interact with an SPOC platform, this study collects their online behaviors for a semester and adopts a lag sequential analysis approach to identify significant transitions between interactions with content, peers, and instructors. Regarding content, after entering courses, the students tend to access learning resources. Besides, the transitions between learning resources and personal performance are significantly interconnected to each other. Regarding peers, the interaction with classmates was mainly connected to the access of assignments and performance. Regarding instructors, the interaction with teachers was minor but connected to all other behaviors. In addition, the results also show that students’ online behavioral patterns in SPOCs may change over time. The implications of the findings for SPOCs research are discussed in this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Small private online courses
• SPOC
• blended learning
• online-learning behaviors
• sequential analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hercy N. H. Cheng is currently an associate professor in National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning at Central China Normal University, China.

Zhi Liu is a lecturer in National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning at Central China Normal University, China.

Jianwen Sun is an associate professor in National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning at Central China Normal University, China.

Sanya Liu is an executive deputy director of National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning at Central China Normal University, China.

Zongkai Yang is a president of Central China Normal University, China.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the National Social Science Fund Project of China (grant number: 14BGL131) as well as the Minister of Education of China (grant number: 16YJC880052) and Central China Normal University for financial support (grant numbers: CCNU16A02022, CCNU15A06073, CCNU15A05010, CCNU16JYKX30).