TY - JOUR A1 - Hagedorn, Christiane A1 - Serth, Sebastian A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - The mysterious adventures of Detective Duke BT - how storified programming MOOCs support learners in achieving their learning goals JF - Frontiers in education N2 - About 15 years ago, the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) appeared and revolutionized online education with more interactive and engaging course designs. Yet, keeping learners motivated and ensuring high satisfaction is one of the challenges today's course designers face. Therefore, many MOOC providers employed gamification elements that only boost extrinsic motivation briefly and are limited to platform support. In this article, we introduce and evaluate a gameful learning design we used in several iterations on computer science education courses. For each of the courses on the fundamentals of the Java programming language, we developed a self-contained, continuous story that accompanies learners through their learning journey and helps visualize key concepts. Furthermore, we share our approach to creating the surrounding story in our MOOCs and provide a guideline for educators to develop their own stories. Our data and the long-term evaluation spanning over four Java courses between 2017 and 2021 indicates the openness of learners toward storified programming courses in general and highlights those elements that had the highest impact. While only a few learners did not like the story at all, most learners consumed the additional story elements we provided. However, learners' interest in influencing the story through majority voting was negligible and did not show a considerable positive impact, so we continued with a fixed story instead. We did not find evidence that learners just participated in the narrative because they worked on all materials. Instead, for 10-16% of learners, the story was their main course motivation. We also investigated differences in the presentation format and concluded that several longer audio-book style videos were most preferred by learners in comparison to animated videos or different textual formats. Surprisingly, the availability of a coherent story embedding examples and providing a context for the practical programming exercises also led to a slightly higher ranking in the perceived quality of the learning material (by 4%). With our research in the context of storified MOOCs, we advance gameful learning designs, foster learner engagement and satisfaction in online courses, and help educators ease knowledge transfer for their learners. KW - gameful learning KW - storytelling KW - programming KW - learner engagement KW - course design KW - MOOCs KW - content gamification KW - narrative Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1016401 SN - 2504-284X VL - 7 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Preston, Christina A1 - Younie, Sarah T1 - Mentoring in a Digital World BT - What are the Issues? JF - KEYCIT 2014 - Key Competencies in Informatics and ICT N2 - This paper focuses on the results of the evaluation of the first pilot of an e-mentoring unit designed by the Hands-On ICT consortium, funded by the EU LLL programme. The overall aim of this two-year activity is to investigate the value for professional learning of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and Community Online Open Courses (COOCs) in the context of a ‘community of practice’. Three units in the first pilot covered aspects of using digital technologies to develop creative thinking skills. The findings in this paper relate to the fourth unit about e-mentoring, a skill that was important to delivering the course content in the other three units. Findings about the e-mentoring unit included: the students’ request for detailed profiles so that participants can get to know each other; and, the need to reconcile the different interpretations of e-mentoring held by the participants when the course begins. The evaluators concluded that the major issues were that: not all professional learners would self-organise and network; and few would wish to mentor their colleagues voluntarily. Therefore, the e-mentoring issues will need careful consideration in pilots two and three to identify how e-mentoring will be organised. KW - MOOCs KW - e-mentoring KW - professional development KW - ICT skills KW - user-centred Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-82895 SN - 1868-0844 SN - 2191-1940 IS - 7 SP - 343 EP - 350 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -