Four types of MOOC research

Posted on December 14th, 2013

Justin Reich, a HarvardX Research Fellow, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a lecturer in the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program, describes four categories of MOOC research: “Fishing Expeditions in the Exhaust,” in which researchers report the observations from MOOCs clickstream data; “Experiments in the Periphery,” in which experiments are only conducted on the periphery of courses, du to the disconnect between course teams and researchers; “MOOC-thropology in the Field,” qualitative research through interviews, field observations, screencasts, and content analyses of forums and other peer-production environments; and finally “Design Research in the Core,” in which faculty, course development teams, and researchers work closely together to design courses that have important and interesting questions built into the architecture of the course.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/four_types ofresearch.html