TY - CONF TI - Teaching Assistants' Interventions in Online Courses: A Comparative Study of Two Massive Open Online Courses AU - Ntourmas, Anastasios AU - Avouris, Nikolaos AU - Daskalaki, Sophia AU - Dimitriadis, Yannis T2 - PCI 2018 T3 - PCI '18 AB - The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of teaching assistants' interventions in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The study of interaction patterns in MOOCs can inform the design and development of mechanisms for more effective learning. We performed an analysis of teaching assistants' interactions in two different MOOCs in different subject matters (technology and humanities). The study revealed notable differences in the characteristics of teaching assistants' interventions within the two courses, in terms of language used, length of messages, response time and length of discourse. The findings of this study provide us with useful insights on current human interventions in MOOC forums, driving our effort in designing future modules to support the large number of students of these courses, with the ultimate objective to improve the learning experience for each individual student of future MOOCs. C1 - Athens, Greece C3 - 22nd Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics DA - 2018/12// PY - 2018 DO - 10.1145/3291533.3291563 DP - ACM Digital Library SP - 288 EP - 293 PB - ACM SN - 978-1-4503-6610-6 ST - Teaching Assistants' Interventions in Online Courses UR - http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3291533.3291563 Y2 - 2019/07/10/06:24:09 KW - discussion forum KW - learning analytics KW - massive open online courses KW - teaching assistant intervention ER -