Measuring the effectiveness of news literacy education through a MOOC:

What we can learn from the behavioural data and learning analytics for better strategies

Abstract

This paper discusses a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on news literacy taught by the researcher entitled “HKU04x Making Sense of News,” which was provided on edX, the non-profit online education portal founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, between May 19 and June 29, 2015. More than 7,500 students from 147 countries were enrolled in the six-week course. The preliminary research presented in the paper taps into the large quantity of student demographic and behavioural data that logged every single mouse click, video player control, activity participation and all the other interactions between each learner and the learning platform to explore how educators could take advantage of the learning analytics. It focuses on specific variables, such as the relationship between the frequency of discussion forum posts and assignment grades, and educational background and overall assignment scores. The findings demonstrate the possibilities and future directions of news and media literacy teaching and research in the digital age. The paper discusses some of the pertinent key elements of news literacy education in today’s technologically interconnected societies, while exploring the idea of future computer modelling that could provide move insight into the design of effective curricula, instructional designs, technological architecture and other teaching plans and strategies.