Open Online Study Group (OOSG)
- Have you ever taken a Coursera or edX course?
- Were you able to find an exciting diverse team to study with or did you feel lonely?
- Did you wish you had an active community to learn with?
If you had any of these experiences, you are in the right place. We are building tools for MOOC communities to work as effective and supportive small groups.
- Get to know us?
- What are we doing?
- What do we need?
- How can you get involved?
- Get in touch
- Find out more
What are we doing?
The problem
Online learning in MOOCs focuses on the transfer of information and completing assessments. Learners in MOOCs are generally isolated from the thousands of other learners who are engaged with the course at the same time.
- How might we connect learners in a MOOC course and empower them to learn together as a diverse team?
- How might we grow the learning community to enable finding effective learners and forming teams?
- How might we facilitate a larger community and a smaller community to perform in a coherent group?
Our solution
We are building a platform to gather learners and help them work in teams around courses and interests. We believe in forming an active learning community to work as a team where members support each other and collectively benefit.
So far, we have started designing this system and are implementing it with a Discourse forum. We hope to use Discourse plugins to add specific features.
How can you get involved?
We need both learners and technical contributors. We need help in clarifying our ideas, gathering participants, and implementing the solutions we design together.
We are open to all participants and adhere to the contributor covenant.
Everyone is welcome to join our monthly town hall meetings - signup for invitations to join meeetings, and you can contribute in different ways depending on your background:
Being a non-technical contributor
Join the conversation on our forum: (link coming soon) and join the chatroom in Gitter
- Share your experiences and challenges with MOOCs
- Help us refine our solutions and share your ideas
Being a technical contributor
Check our open issues. Issues tagged mozsprint are especially suitable for getting started by joining the conversation, or adding a solution with a pull request.
Being a research contributor
While we are building the learning community, we would also focus on researching
- How online learners learn best?
- How do online learners their platforms to be design?
- What makes online learners best connect with each other?
- Do online learners network/ connect and learn?
- How online learners network/ connect and learn?
- Do they learn better when connected than just learning on selfphase?
Join the research discussions and conducting research actively with our core team and publish in research scholarly articles. For this we expect you to have expereince in research writing and research methodologies. Sign up to be a research contributer - Join in
If you're interested in UI/UX and usability research, let us know. We’re eager to get you involved.
Get in touch
Join our mailing list to hear when there are major updates (link coming soon), and join our forum to be part of the conversation (link coming soon).
Get to know us
We are a team excited by online learning and interested in improving it by building active communities around learning interests. We each bring different academic and technical backgrounds:
| Contributor | Biography |
|---|---|
| Dilrukshi Gamage (@iceLearn) | Project lead and PhD student in her final year in the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Dilrukshi has participated in around 60 MOOCs since 2012 and found many interesting gaps in open online learning which she is studying in her PhD. |
| Mark Whiting (@markwhiting) | Postdoc at Stanford in the HCI group. |
| Hasara Maithree (@deHasara) | CSE undergraduate student at the University of Moratuwa, in Sri Lanka. She is interested in ML, AI and HCI. |
We are eager to learn more with the community and are looking forward to working with all of you.