SUPPORTING SOCIAL INTERACTION AND COLLABORATION ON AN XMOOC PLATFORM

Particularly in the context of education and e-learning, the topics social interaction and collaboration have been a little strained during the recent decades. Particularly, stakeholders(1) with an educational background often criticize that xMOOCs follow an approach that is too close to traditional frontal instruction; that they lack sophisticated options for user interaction. The team that is developing and running the openHPI (x)MOOC platform, in general, approves these statements. To improve this situation, a major research effort has been started to explore the different aspects of social interaction amongst course participants. The range of the examined options includes importing existing friend connections from social networks such as Facebook or Google+, adding social network features within the openHPI platform, but also collaboration features such as learning groups and group exercises. The paper at hand focuses on the evaluation of a survey that has been conducted amongst the users of the openHPI platform.