Crowdsourcing Cognitive Presence: A Quantitative Content Analysis of a K12 Educator MOOC Discussion Forum

<p>Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer participants opportunities to engage with content and discussion forums similar to other online courses. Pedagogical components of MOOCs and the nature of learning are worth of examining due to issues involving scale, interaction and the role of the instructor (Ross, Sinclair, Know, Bayne & McLeod, 2014). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework provides a basis for measuring cognitive presence in online discussion forums. As voluntary point of entry to a community of learners, it is important to consider the nature of participant contributions in terms of cognitive presence. This study focused on an educator MOOC because MOOCs have been proposed as an efficient vehicle for providing professional development due to the significant self-identification of participants as educators (Ho et al. 2014).</p> <p>Participant attributes have been categorized, however the discussion forum is difficult to study on a massive scale (Kizilcec, Piech, & Schulz, 2013). Automated measures of cognitive presence may not provide the full view of learning behaviors implicit in messages posted to the forums (Wong, Pursel, Divinsky & Jansen, 2015). To address this gap, the forum messages were hand-coded and analyzed using quantitative content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002). The study found that the measure of exploration increased over the duration of the course. Viewing cognitive presence over time provided a new metaphor for explaining the proportions of cognitive presence in the discussion forum of an educator MOOC. This finding suggests that increased instructor presence during the later stages of the course may increase cognitive presence over time (Akyol & Garrison, 2007; Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005).</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership (Ed.D)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Leadership

Year dc:date.available

2017

Author dc:creator

• Shields, Kathryn Dawson

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Julia S. Fuller
• Dr. Mei-Lin Chang
• Dr. Leslie Pourreau

• K-12
• professional learning
• MOOC
• online learning
• discussion forum
• cognitive presence
• Instructional Media Design
• Online and Distance Education
• Other Teacher Education and Professional Development
• Teacher Education and Professional Development

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/teachleaddoc_etd/14

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu:teachleaddoc_etd-1015