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 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Serth, Sebastian A1 - Thomas, Max A1 - Ebner, Martin A1 - Koschutnig-Ebner, Markus A1 - Rampelt, Florian A1 - von Stetten, Alexander A1 - Wittke, Andreas ED - Meinel, Christoph ED - Schweiger, Stefanie ED - Staubitz, Thomas ED - Conrad, Robert ED - Alario Hoyos, Carlos ED - Ebner, Martin ED - Sancassani, Susanna ED - Żur, Agnieszka ED - Friedl, Christian ED - Halawa, Sherif ED - Gamage, Dilrukshi ED - Scott, Jeffrey ED - Kristine Jonson Carlon, May ED - Deville, Yves ED - Gaebel, Michael ED - Delgado Kloos, Carlos ED - von Schmieden, Karen T1 - A metastandard for the international exchange of MOOCs BT - the MOOChub as first prototype JF - EMOOCs 2023 : Post-Covid Prospects for Massive Open Online Courses - Boost or Backlash? N2 - The MOOChub is a joined web-based catalog of all relevant German and Austrian MOOC platforms that lists well over 750 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Automatically building such a catalog requires that all partners describe and publicly offer the metadata of their courses in the same way. The paper at hand presents the genesis of the idea to establish a common metadata standard and the story of its subsequent development. The result of this effort is, first, an open-licensed de-facto-standard, which is based on existing commonly used standards and second, a first prototypical platform that is using this standard: the MOOChub, which lists all courses of the involved partners. This catalog is searchable and provides a more comprehensive overview of basically all MOOCs that are offered by German and Austrian MOOC platforms. Finally, the upcoming developments to further optimize the catalog and the metadata standard are reported. KW - Digitale Bildung KW - Kursdesign KW - MOOC KW - Micro Degree KW - Online-Lehre KW - Onlinekurs KW - Onlinekurs-Produktion KW - digital education KW - e-learning KW - micro degree KW - micro-credential KW - online course creation KW - online course design KW - online teaching Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-624154 SP - 147 EP - 161 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Serth, Sebastian A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - van Elten, Martin A1 - Meinel, Christoph ED - Gamage, Dilrukshi T1 - Measuring the effects of course modularizations in online courses for life-long learners JF - Frontiers in Education N2 - Many participants in Massive Open Online Courses are full-time employees seeking greater flexibility in their time commitment and the available learning paths. We recently addressed these requirements by splitting up our 6-week courses into three 2-week modules followed by a separate exam. Modularizing courses offers many advantages: Shorter modules are more sustainable and can be combined, reused, and incorporated into learning paths more easily. Time flexibility for learners is also improved as exams can now be offered multiple times per year, while the learning content is available independently. In this article, we answer the question of which impact this modularization has on key learning metrics, such as course completion rates, learning success, and no-show rates. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of longer breaks between modules on these metrics. According to our analysis, course modules facilitate more selective learning behaviors that encourage learners to focus on topics they are the most interested in. At the same time, participation in overarching exams across all modules seems to be less appealing compared to an integrated exam of a 6-week course. While breaks between the modules increase the distinctive appearance of individual modules, a break before the final exam further reduces initial interest in the exams. We further reveal that participation in self-paced courses as a preparation for the final exam is unlikely to attract new learners to the course offerings, even though learners' performance is comparable to instructor-paced courses. The results of our long-term study on course modularization provide a solid foundation for future research and enable educators to make informed decisions about the design of their courses. KW - Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) KW - course design KW - modularization KW - learning path KW - flexibility KW - e-learning KW - assignments KW - self-paced learning Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1008545 SN - 2504-284X VL - 7 PB - Frontiers CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bethge, Joseph A1 - Serth, Sebastian A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Wuttke, Tobias A1 - Nordemann, Oliver A1 - Das, Partha-Pratim A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - TransPipe BT - A Pipeline for Automated Transcription and Translation of Videos JF - EMOOCs 2021 N2 - Online learning environments, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), often rely on videos as a major component to convey knowledge. However, these videos exclude potential participants who do not understand the lecturer’s language, regardless of whether that is due to language unfamiliarity or aural handicaps. Subtitles and/or interactive transcripts solve this issue, ease navigation based on the content, and enable indexing and retrieval by search engines. Although there are several automated speech-to-text converters and translation tools, their quality varies and the process of integrating them can be quite tedious. Thus, in practice, many videos on MOOC platforms only receive subtitles after the course is already finished (if at all) due to a lack of resources. This work describes an approach to tackle this issue by providing a dedicated tool, which is closing this gap between MOOC platforms and transcription and translation tools and offering a simple workflow that can easily be handled by users with a less technical background. The proposed method is designed and evaluated by qualitative interviews with three major MOOC providers. Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-516943 VL - 2021 SP - 79 EP - 94 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -