THE SPECIFICATION OF RUSSIAN MOOC AUDIENCE

A sharp increase in popularity of massive open online courses (MOOC) worldwide resulted in a comprehensive scientific and applied interest towards this model of distant learning. Understanding of the target MOOC audience, its characteristic features and demands is crucial for the initiatives undertaken by domestic higher educational establishments in the organization of distant online courses. Nevertheless, little is known about Russian segment of MOOC learners. Among the reasons for that one can mention the scarcity of empirical data available for analysis. This paper explores Russian segment of MOOC participants and is grounded on the public dataset of de-identified students of 13 courses hosted on EdX platform during academic year 2012/2013. The authors stated three research questions and obtained answers by means of quantitative methods, methods of graphical data analysis and unsupervised learning. The main findings, grouped by research questions, are outlined below. Is there a demand for MOOC in Russia? What is the activity level of Russian MOOC audience? Russian audience, overall, is substantially interested in distant learning offerings in accordance with MOOC model. Russia ranks third in the worldwide ranking of countries based on learning effectiveness criteria - the fraction of learners who accessed more than a half of course contents and fraction of certified students. Russian MOOC audience activity measured by three criteria (fraction of courseware chapters accessed, number of play video events within the course, number of unique interaction days with the course) is higher compared to the worldwide level, and the differences are statistically significant. What are the gender, age and educational structures of Russian MOOC audience? A typical representative of Russian MOOC audience is male aged 24, a holder of master’s degree. The interquartile range of learners’ age distribution is 21-27 years of age, whereas the overall share of master’s and bachelor’s degree holders is 68.6%. Thus, when taking into account a typical age interval of higher education acquisition in Russia, university offerings of distant learning programmes may be targeted towards undergraduate and postgraduate students. What is the generic learning curve of Russian audience under MOOC model? Are there any peculiar properties of interest? The generic learning curve of Russian audience has an expected exponential form, thought a great diversity of individual learning paths for MOOC interaction exists. The paper suggests an explanation of two interaction scenarios, formed by the most prominent deviations from the generic learning curve. It is also shown that late course registration, which results in participant’s isolation from the rest of the learners who started their educational activities in sync with the course start date, has a negative impact on the overall learning effectiveness of such participants. This peculiarity of distant learning model should be taken into consideration by MOOC organizers due to a substantial relative amount of learners belonging to the “late registrants” group. The results obtained can be employed by domestic higher educational establishments when creating educational content for distant learning.

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