Muyun Yang (Stella)

For 2042 Personally Speaking, the scenario “Trust yourself” is most viable in 2042 in the Facer & Sandford (2010) reading. It predicts a highly individualized world where people can develop their lifelong personalized education system composed of components chosen from the standardized provision. In my viewpoint, the personalized product can be viewed as a symbol of development in highly commercialized society. In the post-industrialization era, people start to get tired of standardized products and seek for more specific service. As the cost of personalized decreases, especially the fixed costs since most of the personalized studying plans can be achieved through the Internet in present time, more education firms enter in this market. This situation would avail us of lowering price of the individualized education system. For instance, in the past, only members of upper class have the privilege to hire several tutors to take care of every aspect of their studying. However,...

Following suggestions of the professor, I narrow the scope of study and regard xMOOCs as the object of the literature review. After the discussion with classmates, I found that the components of my research question are not so clear. Since my research question is   “What features of social media can be utilized to help xMOOC to improve students’ engagement?” , I am supposed to make it clear what are the principles and standards of engagement level. So in this week, I mainly focus on the engagement in xMOOCs and conclude some standards according to past research papers. Collaboration and discussion forums The xMOOCs provide learners a chance to experience co-creation rather than accessing stale catalogs of content( Cormier & Siemens, 2010) and discussion forums are symbols of co-creation.  Integration of social media tools into popular open learning sources may complement the shortage of discussion forums due to its non-anonymous characteristic (Anderi & Vlad...

My research question is that “What features of social media can be utilized to help MOOC to improve students’ engagement?” and I plan to access this problem from two aspects: The first point is about existing problems of MOOCs platforms and why those problems block further students’ engagement. Secondly, I would point to the features of successful cases of utilizing social media platforms to promote engagement and participation. In this way, it is easier to investigate what features of social media can be applied to MOOCs. In this week, I have mainly looked through research papers about this topic. And I find that the engagement problems are more severe in adult learning. Since undergraduates and master students may be pushed by colleges and academic requirement, they are more active participants. And they also can get access to off-line studying resources compared to people who have already worked. Thus, I am considering redefining the objects I will focus on. Besides, I ...