Evaluation in MOOC Reviews

Abstract

Evaluative feedback in digital communication has already become a frequent social practice across contexts. In digital education, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) reviews stand out as a rich source of evaluation and can potentially offer opportunities to better understand how evaluation is done in this to date little explored feedback environment. In this chapter, I examine evaluation as stance in a set of Coursera reviews specifically focusing on objects/aspects of positive and negative evaluation and some discourse-level features of such evaluative language. My analysis indicates that Coursera reviewers mostly express their subjective evaluation on content quality, followed by materials and activities, overall course experience, assessment, and finally instructor. The tone of their evaluation on these aspects is mostly positive except for the stance object of assessment as all the reviewers included in the sample express their negative evaluation on this aspect. Additionally, evaluative feedback in reviews involves some specific discourse features, such as multiple aspect evaluation, an instance of micro-narration, the case of a lexical item serving both positive and negative stance, and expression of emotions. This chapter finishes with important pedagogical implications of exploring MOOC feedback for digital learning and course design.