Students' Question Posing In MOOCs Forums And Its Relationship With Academic Achievement And Instructors' Involvement

The vigorous development of massive open online courses attracts thousands of learners to participate in the MOOCs learning.When learners encounter difficulties or get confused,they can ask for help by posing their questions in the course forums.These questions can reflect learners' needs,thinking styles,and information processing abilities.Students' question asking behavior in the traditional classroom is rare,then how about the frequency in the new online learning platform?The present study analyzed students' question posing behaviors in a course named The Introduction to Psychology on the Chinese MOOCs platform XuetangX.First,we filtered students' question posts in the forum,and developed standards to classify them into five main categories:course management questions,course content questions,interaction questions unrelated to course content,platform operation questions and others,based on both the theoretical work in question classification and MOOCs forum researches.Further classification of the course content questions were also made to judge the cognitive processing depth.Then,study one explored the quantity and quality of students' question posts in the forum and compared the differences of them between higher academic achievement group which is qualified to apply for the course certificate and the lower group which is unqualified.Study two analyzed the relationship between instructors' involvement and students' question posing in three seasons of the same course,and 'validated the results of the study one.Finally,the results showed that only part results of study one established in study two.The average number of questions per person in different seasons is less than 2,which is consistent with traditional classroom studies.Although the number and proportion of all kinds of questions are different in three seasons,most of the course content questions are deep questions.Chi square test and Wilcoxon signed rank test were used to analyze the differences between the qualified and the unqualified group.Results indicated that higher achievement learners asked significantly more questions in total and management questions than the lower group,suggesting that question as a kind of cognitive strategy is closely related to learning effect.Furthermore,study two also found that instructors' involvement influenced students' questioning behaviors.Qualified group would ask more course content questions in the season with higher instructors' involvement.In order to improve the interaction and teaching quality of MOOCs,instructors' should take measures to improve the usability of forums,encourage learners to pose questions and cultivate their ability of inquiry.