Research

This page contains an overview of the tools available for conducting research on the MOOC platform.

Who can use data for research purposes

As a rule of thumb, employees of the University of Helsinki can conduct research on the MOOC platform data. If you are employed at another university, please contact get in touch with the MOOC Center. Only data related to students who have explicitly given research permission can be used (more information below).

Skills needed

The data available as multiple downloads in CSV format. It is necessary to be able to connect data from various CSV files and filter the data.

Student consent

Generic consent form

• Each student who has created a user account is asked to explicitly state whether their data can be used for educational research.

Course specific research consent form

• In addition to the generic consent form. It is possible for course staff to create a custom research consent form.
• This form is connected to a specific course and showed to any student who starts to study the course.
• You can create one additional custom form per course.
• The form can include several check boxes (for example, for multiple different studies)

Contents of the generic consent form

Educational research is conducted on the courses. This research has multiple goals:

1. to develop learning materials so that they take individual differences in learning into account and can individualize content in the material based on the learner,
2. advance knowledge and understanding about learning in online learning environments, and
3. provide research-based support to other learning material developers and educational researchers, which will lead into a better learning experience for students.

Data from the learning process, and data you give us through questionnaires, is used in this research. The data includes information about learning material usage, course assignment progress and completion, and exam performance. Individual students cannot be identified from any published results. Participation is voluntary, and if you do not wish to participate in the research, there are no consequences to you. University of Helsinki is responsible for the research. You can request the deletion of data related to you at any time by sending an email to mooc@cs.helsinki.fi.

[ ] I want to participate in the educational research. By choosing this, you help both current and future students.

[ ] I do not want to participate in the educational research.

Collected data

The data collected in MOOC.fi consists of

• exercise submissions,
• chatbot logs (specific consent required)
• learning analytics (aggregated data which contain no personal information)

Where to download data

You can download different data as CSV files.

1. Overview
2. Scroll down the page to find the download links