Learner Groups in Massive Open Online Courses

The open nature of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attracts a large number of learners with different backgrounds, skills, motivations, and goals. This has brought a need to understand such heterogeneity in populations of MOOC learners. Categorizing these learners based upon their interaction with the course can help address this need and suggest possible improvements in course design and delivery. In this article, the K-means clustering technique with careful seeding is used to obtain clusters of learners having similar interaction in the course. Learners are grouped based on their interaction with course material, video lectures, discussion forums, and assessments. In the analysis of thirteen courses, the proposed method identified learners’ classes as Uninterested, Casuals, Performers, Explorers and Achievers. Each class of learners had distinct interaction with the course and followed a certain learning approach. The learners’ classes were mapped to the standard surface, deep, and strategic learning approaches.This article also highlights the data preparation phase and its importance in data mining.     

“I Want to Feel That I Live in China”: Imaginaries and Hospitality in International Students’ (mis-)Encounters at a Top Chinese University

Research on international students’ experiences abroad has tended to rely on models of adjustment, integration and/or acculturation to describe their (mis-)encounters with different kinds of people (e.g., co-nationals, locals and other international students). This paper proposes to use the more fluid concepts of imaginaries and hospitality, leaving behind stages and phases of adaption and acculturation, and focusing on the influence of the Structure on their experiences. Based on a discursive pragmatic analysis of interview data with 20 international students at a top Chinese university, the authors review how the students describe the kind of hospitality experienced at this institution and the influence that it has on their (mis-)encounters. Culturalist, differentialist and essentialist imaginaries (static and fixed views of Chineseness) are often used to justify the lack of encounters and the “segregation” and somewhat “positive discrimination” that they experienced. However, the paper shows that, amongst others, the institutional hospitality management for international students leads to closed contexts of encounters and feelings of exclusion. Although the study serves as a case study and cannot be generalized to the many and varied experiences of international students in other universities in China, some recommendations are made to solve, at least in part, misconceptions about what interculturality and hospitality entail in the internationalization of higher education.