Cultivating social support through MOOC communities of practice in the Philippines

MOOCs in their original ethos had the goal of democratizing education for all and broadening the knowledge gap, particularly in the STEM fields worldwide. This goal was short-lived as they were met with a challenge of completion rates at 10%, which is more than would have existed without MOOCs, but a far cry from what was hoped. Early challenges pointed toward a lack of interactivity with the instructor and social support from peers. Relationships between completers and SRL attributes were studied, and it was thought that highly self-regulated learners were the only ones capable of completing MOOCs. Communities of Practice and cMOOC interventions showed promise in bringing more learners to completion. MOOC Camps are one such example where online MOOCs are used in face-to-face contexts to strengthen the breadth and depth of the content through discussions, debates, and projects with a local facilitator. Social Support is a subscale of SRL that is thought to be a fixed trait, and scales have found it to be a threat to validity in MOOC research on the topic. The Philippines has a robust community of 8000+ MOOCers uplifting one another to MOOC completion and increasing teacher quality in English classrooms. This case study explores SRL-O data, archival course data, and focus group remarks to indicate that help-seeking is very much not a fixed trait and, with the right social supports, it can be cultivated and localized to increase MOOC completion and fill knowledge gaps. The assumption that MOOC learning is only for the highly self-motivated is flawed, and stakeholders should implement them more intentionally. MOOC designers should also devise community building and social support to increase the uptake of their investment in lectures from subject matter experts and realize the original dream of MOOCs – to uplift the world with high-class education, eliminating the place, space, and cost barriers to entry.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ed.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Kaufmann Jr., Thomas W

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cope, Bill
• Kalantzis, Mary
• Magee, Liam
• You, Yu-ling

• MOOC, SRL, MOOC Camp, Community of Practice, Connectivism

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Thomas Kaufmann Jr.

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132543

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132543