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Design Thinking Research pp 67–92Cite as

Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes

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Part of the book series: Understanding Innovation ((UNDINNO))

Abstract

Massive online classes are global and diverse. How can we harness this diversity to improve engagement and learning? Currently, though enrollments are high, students’ interactions with each other are minimal: most are alone together. This isolation is particularly disappointing given that a global community is a major draw of online classes. This paper illustrates the potential of leveraging geographic diversity in massive online classes. We connect students from around the world through small-group video discussions. Our peer discussion system, Talkabout, has connected over 5000 students in 14 online classes. Three studies with 2670 students from two classes found that globally diverse discussions boost student performance and engagement: the more geographically diverse the discussion group, the better the students performed on later quizzes. Through this work, we challenge the view that online classes are useful only when in-person classes are unavailable. Instead, we demonstrate how diverse online classrooms can create benefits that are largely unavailable in a traditional classroom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While only marginally significant (p < 0.10), we include this result because it is suggests opportunities for future work.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dan Schwartz for thought-provoking discussions and feedback with early drafts; Coursera and the OpenEdX teams for platform integration and encouraging instructors to try Talkabout; instructors of the many MOOCs who use Talkabout in their classes, and the many students who connected with their peers and shared their stories with us. This research was funded in part through NSF grants #1351131 and #1444865, the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Program, and the Siebel Scholars Program. This research was conducted under Stanford IRB protocol #30319.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Chinmay Kulkarni & Michael S. Bernstein

  2. Stanford University and Coursera Inc., Stanford, CA, USA

    Julia Cambre

  3. UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Yasmine Kotturi & Scott Klemmer

Authors
  1. Chinmay Kulkarni
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  2. Julia Cambre
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  3. Yasmine Kotturi
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  4. Michael S. Bernstein
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  5. Scott Klemmer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chinmay Kulkarni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Potsdam, Germany

    Hasso Plattner

  2. Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Potsdam, Germany

    Christoph Meinel

  3. Center for Design Research (CDR), Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Larry Leifer

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Kulkarni, C., Cambre, J., Kotturi, Y., Bernstein, M.S., Klemmer, S. (2016). Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19641-1_6

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