There has been a rapid growth in the use of online educational technologies in about a decade. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera, Udacity, edX, Udemy, Khan Academy etc. are being used by people from all backgrounds and ages either to supplement their learning process, skill building, or just as a lifelong learning experience. The demand for online education has increased more than ever. However, the resources (both technical and social) required to maintain these online classes are scarce.

As a matter of fact, approximately about 80% of enrolled learners in the most popular online platform, Coursera drops out which is a biggest threat to goals to democratize education and making education accessible to those who needed it. Theories from learning science suggest that students drop out from online courses due to the lack of support system. Students often commented out that they do not receive proper or timely feedback to their assignments diminishing learning outcome. Instructors often try to send feedback but the size of the class makes it impossible to send personalized feedback to the students’ submissions. These factors contribute to decrease of students’ engagement with the course, thereby reducing their motivation to complete the classes. Relying on discussion forums and autonomous chat bots in helping with students’ queries also have not been proved effective yet.

One of the drawbacks in online education is that there is little to no acknowledgement to the completion of the class. In a quick survey conducted by our team, students often commented out that there is no incentive for them to complete the course other than personal growth. While that is important and critical aspect of the learning, we thought there is something more that can be done in online educational space to motivate users to participate fully.

Many LinkedIn users have started to tie up their digital badge or coursera completion certificates as one of their achievements on their LinkedIn profile in a hope to increase their marketability. However, little to no attention has been paid to actually attaching the tangible outcome associated with the online learning. Universities, and hiring companies hardly acknowledge learning gained through (self) online education. We believe that a proper incentivizing mechanisms could motivate the enrolled students to complete the courses.

We propose a system in which users are ranked and grouped together as virtual peers according to their knowledge levels. These peers will give each other feedbacks on course projects and assignments in a "credit" system. The major way to earn more credits is to login and provide feedbacks for outstanding projects which were submitted by other users. Our system will also ensure that users are matched with assignments and projects they are qualified (preferred) and over-qualified (in case of congested system) to peer-review. We will develop an engine that will reward the enrolled students for their time and efforts spent in the class. Using the machine learning techniques over the profile data, and using 3rd party API services provided by online platforms, we would develop ranking and rating model.

To determine users' knowledge levels for ranking and grouping, the system interacts directly with MOOC sites such as Udemy, Coursera, edX, and more via the REST APIs independently maintained by each provider. Each user who signs up for the system will be asked to link their account with the relevant course providers for their learning progress to sync with our system on a regular basis. Our system enables deep peer discussions and critiques on course projects which will further engage the users in learning and asking critical questions pertaining to the topics of interest. Because our system operates on a reciprocal feedback among users, we will implement strict policies on abusive user behaviors such as signing up for multiple accounts for free credits, providing feedbacks of poor quality to gain more credits, and more.

Recent studies (Zheng et al, 2015) found that students have started to resort out to apps and discussion forums such as Facebook groups, Group me, Slack community, Viber, and WhatsApp group, WeChat, LinkedIn group to exchange ideas, solicit feedback, and get help from peers along the way. As an example, "Unofficial Coursera Machine Learning” Facebook group is live, where you will see thousands of users enrolled in anticipation of peer feedback on their assignments. However, the design and appropriation of these tools for interactive and proper feedback exchanges are limited. In fact, these tools were not designed for this purpose, and thus does not adhere perfectly to increasing student engagement and overall learning outcome. Our solution is a platform that would help students participate in free exchange of feedback. Our team wants to use the biggest challenge in online education, i.e., large student body to our advantage instead. This not only helps us in generating quality feedback but also helps us sustain learning at scale.

A study by Wall Street journal expressed that companies are willing to hire someone who demonstrates track record of going above-and-beyond to learn and grow through their own potential. Our team believes that enrolling in these online courses despite the hurdles of work and family commitments, and limitations posed by remote online education, is already a testament to student’s work ethic, and this deserves to be rewarded. The rankings and profile of the students in our system will be an evidence to the aspiring hiring companies to filter and self-select potential candidates. This is a win for both the students and the hiring companies.

We started from creating a sketch of the wireframe of the platform. Click through user scenarios will be used to explain how the platform works. In this scenario, a student wants to help another student's assignment in a Network & Telecommunications class.

MOOCs are also being labeled as another ‘disruptive, innovative’ technology (Schubarth, C. 2013, citing Clayton Christensen) in the field of education. Some edu-critics consider MOOCs as a significant achievement in the history of education often quoting this trend may cause many institutions to decline (Leckart, S. (2012). Whereas some argue that MOOCs provide us with unprecedented opportunities to establish global equity through equal access i.e., democratization of education. Due to this particular attribute many individuals call it a phenomenon that could drastically improve existing social divisions and inequalities existing in our today’s world. The Internet is portrayed as an enabler to many societal improvements, and online learning is often cited as a medium for enhancing knowledge acquisition through social connectedness (Brindley, J, 2009). Many theorists also believe that online learning provides a platform democratic exchange of ideas engaging people with diverse viewpoints and backgrounds (Haythornthwaite, C, 2011).

However, concerns on dropping enrollment rates in online education, lack of timely feedback to student’s learning process, and inability to incentivize students caused us to not use the full potential of online education yet. Our solution explores perspectives from online course providers and fellow students/learners, and provide solution to help these challenges.

MOOCs are growing, and we can be hopeful for the positive changes. However, MOOC completion rates are reputedly low, and the dropout is hovering over 80% for an average MOOC course registrant holding 43,000 students (Jordan, K. (2014). Taking the course simultaneously with thousands of learners is no longer a selling point of MOOCs (from a course providers’ perspective). From students’ perspective, there is no proper support system to fully participate in the course. There’s been a decisive shift to focus on “actual learning” to learning just for curiosity’s sake. Data from a private agency, 2016 suggests that there are about 6850 courses offered in MOOCs reaching out to total of 58 million learners till date in platforms such as Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, Udacity, XuetangX (non- English). The number of MOOC-based credentials & sequences of MOOCs that result in a certification in a specific topic area, also grew by 150% to over 250 this year. Essentially we are looking at enriching the quality of education received over by the students. With increased quality feedback, we keep students motivated in online learning, thereby leading to a competitive online educational model. This fosters cost effective education, education-for-all, and in turn help produce students that are all educated and engaged to lead our society.

Competition and consolidation in technology sector/ Adoption:
As with any startup project the biggest risk to our system is adoption. Our preliminary research indicates that lots of learners are indeed resorting out to social media groups for discussion instead. While users of those Facebook groups indicated those pages have not been particularly helpful for students to receive feedback on time, or to help them stay motivated to complete the online course, or even to help them to market their skills gained, our challenge would still be to get users to migrate from these legacy groups to a newly proposed system such as ours. In contrary, these groups can actually act to our advantage if we execute our plans well. Rather than having to go to numerous places or sites to ask people to use our system, we could specifically target these social media groups for our preliminary rounds where we could post information or advertise about our tool.

Market risk and Legal Proceedings:
In the interest of funding, we have not explored deeply about intellectual/legal implications of the product. However, since ours is a software system and under a rare assumption that none of our system ended up being not intellectually protected, Facebook, GroupMe, Reddit, or even online Course providers can invest their resources and time to actually developing the product themselves. However, based on our analysis we believe these companies are reluctant to invest their resources on something that’s so minute and trivial, and tangential to their core company’s mission and products. We will develop a general platform that caters to multiple course providers.

Technical risks:
If we were to successfully adopt and integrate the system to any of the online course providers, this will be a great boost up to the product’s influence. However, handling things at scale could turn out unexpected from engineering standpoint. It is unwise to guess how crowd acts or uses our system.

Based from our research, this project is proven to be a great platform for unifying different existing massive open online courses and a great platform that enables peer to peer discussion. We will decide later if we want to move on to create this project into an actual product & service. We could start the development of the product by contacting multiple massive open online course platforms such as EdX, Coursera, and Udemy to confirm that they agree to be integrated in the platform.