More Thoughts on the Dissertation

After few days reading the articles, "critical thinking" - the term I originally used for my dissertation title doesn't seem so bad to me now. Text-based discussion forums provides a means for interaction, consensus searching and new knowledge construction in distance education (Fahy, 2001). Quality of interaction should be able to represent levels of critical thinking of online learners.

Buraphadeja's study (2010) suggested no statistically significant relationship between mean level of knowledge construction in content analysis and SNA while Fahy's study (2001) found analysis results from these two methods supported each other. The differences might come from the different selection of the authors in the tool for content analysis and the target courses they investigated. My theses aims to adopt similar research idea to study a new context - MOOC. Possible finding is the interaction pattern in MOOCs. I also plan to have an in-depth study on several most engaged learners in a selected MOOC to further investigate their interaction patterns. Contribution of the theses to the field would be: suggestions on learning facilitation in MOOCs for instructors and designers.

Oct. 19
I am thinking investigating the following questions:
The depth of learning:
(1) The depth of discussion threads (How many sub-threads does one thread derived? or intensity). Note: 70% messages were posted in the first tow levels (initial post and subtopic 1 (Gibbs, 2008).
(2) Number of topics evolved from the given topic by the instructor?
(3) Have the derivative topics maintained the connection to the goals listed by the instructor at the beginning of the MOOC?
(4) Number of isolated messages
Have the discussion been continued after the MOOC?

The self-organized grouping:
(1) Are there some kinds of homogeneous characteristics presented between members of groups that are self-organized while taking the MOOC? How do the learners choose to connect to someone? (class conduct, initial impressions, and interactions. (Gibbs, 2008, p. 17))
(2) Grouping and centrality (Gibbs, 2008, p. 17)
(3) How long does it take for learners to form a stable (or somewhat stable) discussion group? How long can a group sustain?
(4) Power law
(5) Group size and stability (多少人的組最穩定)

The characteristics of the learner-instructor interaction:
(1) Are there differences in the above four questions between different instructors or MOOCs?

independent variables: learner characteristics, moderating (skills) characteristics/styles, types of posts (5+3 categories in TAT), timeline of posts (when/who post what), social media adopted by learners for this MOOC,
dependent variables: depth of discussion, number of derivative topics, consistence of the derivative topics,