MOOCresearch2.0: A mixed-method and multidisciplinary approach to socio-cognitive conflicts in online educational platforms

Paquot, Magali [UCL] Van de Poel, Bert [UCL] Dumont de Chassart, Philippe [UCL] Frenay, Mariane [UCL] Lambotte, François [UCL] de Montpellier d’Annevoie, Pauline [UCL] Rivera Villa, Dennis [UCL] Swaen, Valérie [UCL] Zienkowski, Jan [UCL]

(eng) In education research, socio-cognitive conflicts (i.e. differences in point of view that are socially experienced and cognitively resolved) have long been regarded as powerful resources to promote conceptual change, learning and knowledge transformation. Learning the scientific meanings of concepts such as “democracy” and “human rights”, for example, often requires re-examination of their personal and everyday meanings. In an education context, they can thus be the source of socio-cognitive conflicts. The problem, however, is that in online education, interactions – which are essential for the emergence and resolution of socio-cognitive conflicts - are limited, primarily asynchronous, and often written in a foreign language by students with diverse professional, educational and cultural backgrounds. The main objective of the MOOCresearch2.0 project is to address the challenges of fostering social interactions to promote learning in MOOCs. To address this challenge, we adopt a multidisciplinary perspective that builds on theories from several disciplines from the humanities and social sciences (linguistics, communication sciences, management studies, and education) and their associated disciplinary methodological toolkits to analyse social interactions and investigate the presence and unfolding of socio-cognitive conflicts in the discussion forums of massive open online courses (MOOCs). The poster will focus more particularly on how tools and techniques from corpus linguistics and natural language processing have started to be used in the project to create a corpus of students’ posts from the EdX platform (https://www.edx.org/), identify posts with rich content, and analyse them with a view to answer research questions such as: (1) To what extent do participants engage cognitively with the course content in MOOC discussion forums? (2) How do controversial debates unfold? (3) To what extent do non-native speakers take part in the richer content-based interactions that can potentially give rise to socio-cognitive conflicts and learning?