Concept Focus: Semantic Meta-Data for Describing MOOC Content

MOOCs promised to herald a new age of open education. However, efficient access to MOOC content is still hard, thus unnecessarily complicating many use cases like efficient re-use of material, or tailored access for life-long learning scenarios. One of the reasons for this lack of accessibility is the shortage of meaningful semantic meta-data describing MOOC content and the resulting learning experience. In this paper, we explore Concept Focus, a new type of meta-data for describing a perceptual facet of modern video-based MOOCs, capturing how focused a learning resource is topic-wise, which is often an indicator of clarity and understandability. We provide the theoretical foundations of Concept Focus and outline a methodical workflow of how to automatically compute it for MOOC lectures. Furthermore, we show that the learners’ consumption behavior is correlated with a MOOC lecture’s Concept Focus, thus underlining that this type of meta-data is indeed relevant for user-centric querying, personalizing or even designing the MOOC experience. For showing this, we performed an extensive study with real-life MOOCs and 12,849 learners over the duration of three months.