Analyzing learners' activity beyond the MOOC

Research on help seeking in MOOCs has mainly focused on analyzing learners' traces within the course forum, or in external social tools which are directly associated to the course. However, little research has been done on the external supplementary websites and digital resources that learners consult outside the MOOC as a way of help seeking. In this working paper, we present the results of an exploratory study with 61 learners from 3 MOOCs in which we analyzed what type of information learners visit outside the MOOC during their study sessions. The results show that learners spent 2% of the time in their study sessions outside the MOOC, being social networking sites, search engines and sites related to the course content the most visited.