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CoFeeMOOC2020: 1st International Workshop on Designing Contingent Feedback for Massive Open Online Courses

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Call For Papers

We invite contributions for the 1st International Workshop on Designing Contingent Feedback for Massive Open Online Courses (CoFeeMOOC 2020) to be held during the 15th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2020).

In this workshop, we will focus on the design of contingent feedback for MOOCs. MOOC participants often tackle problems that, if unsolved, can lead to course disengagement and dropout (Adamopoulos, 2013; Shatnawi, Gaber, & Cocea, 2014; Topali, et. al, 2019). Usually students report problems in the course’s discussion forums, but they do not get the attention they require due to (among others) MOOC-specific aspects, such as:

High instruction-learners ratio: The massive nature of MOOCs makes unmanageable (a) the manual answering to learners’ posts in discussion forums (Shatnawi et al., 2014) and (b) the learners’ tracking regarding their course involvement, progress and difficulties (Almatrafi, Johri, & Rangwala, 2018).
Population´s diversity: The heterogeneity regarding learners' knowledge, background and culture constraints the provision of generic support without meeting the individual needs of participants (Deboer, Seaton, & Breslow, 2013; McKay & Lenarcic, 2015).
Instructors’ high workload: Assisting learners is one of the instructors’ tasks during course run-time, along with a) the implementation of the course components, b) the course supervision overcoming technical or other unexpected issues, c) the promotion of the participants communication (Zheng, Wisniewski, Rosson, & Carroll, 2016).
Covid-19 pandemic outbreak has posed radical challenges in worldwide education shifting learning from the traditional in-person teaching to online settings. Under such circumstances, MOOCs have gained a lot of attention not only as a lifelong learning opportunity for individuals (Rindlisbacher, 2020), but also as a solution for remote learning addressing K12 and university sectors (Ma & Rindlisbacher, 2020). MOOCs are conceived as a form of democratizing education by providing global learning opportunities without geographical and cost restrictions. Nevertheless, since their existence, MOOCs are criticized for their pedagogical constraints affecting courses' quality (Margaryan, Bianco, & Littlejohn, 2015). The lack of timely and effective feedback due to the large number of participants is one of them. Feedback is considered an aspect with high impact in the learning process shaping considerably the learners-to-tutor and learners-to-learners interaction (Deane & Guasch, 2015). The high interest in MOOCs and their current adoption from primary to tertiary levels, require a careful design and application on the provision of appropriate feedback practices. In particular, this workshop aims to:

familiarize participants with the current identification of learners facing difficulties, feedback and support techniques regularly applied in MOOC contexts;
highlight the importance of addressing potential student problems together with the learning design of the course, and;
reflect on specific feedback strategies based on learners’ behaviour evidences.


To that end, we invite participants to submit their contributions (papers, short papers) on - but not limited to- the following topics (with an emphasis on MOOCs):

data-driven identification of "struggling learners"
evidence-based design of adaptive scaffolding
online adaptive and personalized feedback
The participants’ contributions will be blind reviewed by a program committee consisting of experienced researchers in TEL. Accepted papers will be published online in a separate volume of the open CEUR-WS proceedings repository.

Important Dates

Paper Submission: June 22, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: July 10, 2020
Camera Ready Papers Due: July 31, 2020
Conference: September 14-15, 2020
All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) (UTC -12).

Submission guidelines

Submissions will be accepted in two categories: full papers and short papers. Full papers have a length of up to 12 pages and short papers have a length of up to 6 pages (including references).

We use a double-blind reviewing process. Please do not include the author’s name and affiliation or any other type of information that may disclose the authors in the submitted paper itself. Citations to your own relevant work should not be anonymous, but rather should be done without identifying yourself as the author.

Electronic paper submissions should be prepared using the Springer LNCS Proceedings format. You can find LaTeX and Word versions of the template as well as a direct link to the scientific authoring platform Overleaf here: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

Papers should be submitted using the following EasyChair link until the submission deadline: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cofeemooc2020