A participatory action research design to promote knowledge sharing behaviours on MOOC forums

Knowledge sharing in forums is an important part of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). However, the usage of forums to practice knowledge sharing are often inactive and inadequate. To address this problem, we used an action research to build and test a real- time sharing-quality-monitoring mechanism which assesses the quality of answers from text features. The results of this research showed that the mechanism was easy to use and could strengthen one's intentions to share knowledge via regulating its users' knowledge sharing behaviours. However, it may negatively affect peoples' tendency to share knowledge, for example, when they do not want to be monitored and be forced to share or when users feel frustrated using the mechanism. Suggestions for alterations and refinements of the current design are discussed.