Stanford Researchers Use Talkabout Video Discussions to Boost Online Learning

May 7, 2015
Online Learning Keyboard

Researchers at Stanford University have come up with a way to harness an untapped resource to enhance MOOCs: the global diversity of the participants themselves.

A typical MOOC includes enrollees from every habitable continent, spanning diverse cultures and societies across the globe. That diversity is key to Talkabout, an online video discussion group tool developed by Stanford computer science Professor Michael Bernstein, his graduate student

Chinmay Kulkarni, and Scott Klemmer, formerly a Stanford professor of computer science and currently associate professor of computer science and engineering and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

Talkabout discussion groups also affected class performance. Kulkarni discovered that enrollees who participated in discussion groups did better than their peers on course assignments.

Talkabout-based discussion groups may give MOOC enrollees an effective platform to deepen their own understanding of course material, help one another and learn how their peers half a world away interpret subjects from a different perspective.

Read the entire Stanford Report story by James Urton HERE.