Massive Open Online Courses Article Review

Jaimee Arnold

Dr. Saynes

Tests and Measurements

November 26, 2015

Basic Identification

Admiraal W., Huisman B., and Pilli O., (2015). Assessment in massive open online courses.

Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?q=assessment+in+massive+open+online+courses

&pr=on&id=EJ1062116

Summary

The article Assessment in Massive Open Online Courses is a study on methods of

assessment in large online classes. It addresses the issue of the growing popularity of using

technology to provide opportunities for higher education, and not having an efficient way of

giving feedback for some of the more complex assignments. The article gives two possible

solutions to this situation; self- and peer assessment. Beyond that the article explains what these

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) consist of and the various methods of assessment at

Leiden University.

The article starts off with explaining what exactly a MOOC is. In the year 2014 it was

typical for the course to take up to four to ten week to complete and requiring the student to

invest around two to six hours of work per week. In the article it is stated that these courses can

enroll up to thousands of students, but usually there ends up being only mere hundreds that

actually go through with completion of the course. Within the general MOOC there are many
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different types of online courses that can be taken. Out of the several different types there are

two main types of MOOCs; the connectivist or cMOOC and the xMOOC.

Both types of MOOCs have their own approach to facilitating the course material and

how the students interact with it. For the cMOOC there are four points that makes the course

what it is. Those four points are autonomy, diversity, interactivity, and openness. This means that

this type of online course allows students to choose what material and skills that they wish to

learn, they use a variety of tools to obtain information, the course uses a lot of collaborative

work, and students have free access to all material offered. The cMOOC also uses social

networking, blogs, wikis, etc. for learning and assignments. Overall this form of online course

has a very informal course. Assessment for cMOOCs are also informal and consist of informal

feedback from knowledgeable participants.

As for xMOOC it is much more of a formal course. It more or less resembles an on-

campus course. With this course the content is linear and the material is presented through

lectures, pre-recording, and reading. The interaction between the student and teacher is limited,

there may be a prescheduled time for students to come to the teachers office. Assessment for this

course is used through multiple choice quizzes, test, and computer-marked assignments. Other

than these two main types of MOOCs there are also the following: transferMOOCs,

madeMOOCs, synchMOOCs, asynchMOOCs, adaptiveMOOCs, groupMOOCs, and

miniMOOCs.

One of the main issues with MOOCs is assessment. Online courses bring a lot of

questions on how a teacher should go about assessing their students, with a Massive Open Online

Course the following questions are asked: What sorts of learning can be assessed at scale?, How

should individuals be authenticated so that the correct persons work is being assessed?, How can
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cheating be prevented?, and Who should decide how much university credit a MOOC is worth?

(p. 4). With these questions being asked there was an attempt to answer some of them with

automated essay scoring (AES). Three different grading styles were used, there was AES-holistic

grades, AES-rubric grades, and the instructors grades. Out of these three AES-holistic and AES-

rubric grading ended up being similar, but when compared to the instructors grade it didnt

match up. The conclusion was made that using AES grading is not accurate assessments of what

the students were doing. This is where self- and peer assessment comes into play, but the

problem with that is participation.

In the study there was a total of three MOOCs in question. Each course used four types of

assessment during the entirety of the class; those four types were quizzes, self-assessment, peer

assessment, and final exam. What the study shows is that over all the correlation between the

quizzes and final exam seem to be accurate and relate to one another, but the self- and peer

assessment doesnt seem to reflect the final exam grades as well as it was thought that it would.

What they did find through the study that use self- and peer assessment was high quality.

Evaluation

Overall, this article seemed to be on to something. Massive Open Online Courses seem

like a difficult thing to manage. They study and the view of the paper was well organized and

made sense. It went about explaining what a MOOC was and what the issue with them was; it

then went on to explain the study and the results from it. It was an easy article to read and

understand; I wasnt left confused about the information presented or questioning what data they

were trying to get across.

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The article presented a problem and then gave a solution and the study performed to back

up the solutions. One thing that I think the article writers could have done better is to go more in

depth about the process and how they did the study. They gave an efficient amount of

information, but I feel like there could have been even more understanding if they had been some

more details. Also they touched on the participation aspect of such a large class, but they didnt

really go into how that affects the assessment in the course. For example, the peer reviews, if the

student taking the class dont participate in these they are not very helpful to the entirety of the

class. In general I thought the article was well written and even interesting.