SRLx: A Personalized Learner Interface for MOOCs

Abstract

Past research in large-scale learning environments has found one of the most inhibiting factors to learners’ success to be their inability to effectively self-regulate their learning efforts. In traditional small-scale learning environments, personalized feedback (on progress, content, behavior, etc.) has been found to be an effective solution to this issue, but it has not yet widely been evaluated at scale. In this paper we present the Personalized SRL Support System (SRLx), an interactive widget that we designed and open-sourced to improve learners’ self-regulated learning behavior in the Massive Open Online Course platform edX. SRLx enables learners to plan their learning on a weekly basis and view real-time feedback on the realization of those plans. We deployed SRLx in a renewable energies MOOC to more than 2,900 active learners and performed an exploratory analysis on our learners’ SRL behavior.