TeachNow: Enabling Teachers to Provide Spontaneous, Realtime 1:1 Help in Massive Online Courses

TL;DR

TeachNow addresses the challenge of scalable, real-time 1:1 teacher support in MOOCs by enabling teachers to initiate sessions on demand and quickly pair with students actively working on assignments. The system matches volunteers with nudgable students in under 5 minutes and provides a shared IDE/video/chat space for collaboration, demonstrated in a six-week course with $9{,}000$ students and $600$ teachers. In an RCT, a single TeachNow session yielded a $40\%$ increase in course progression within a day and reduced dropout after a week, with overall retention gains around $15\%$, while volunteers and students reported high satisfaction. The work highlights the value of human-centered, on-demand support at scale and points to future directions for generalization, safety, and expanding to peer teaching and broader MOOC adoption.

Abstract

One-on-one help from a teacher is highly impactful for students, yet extremely challenging to support in massive online courses (MOOCs). In this work, we present TeachNow: a novel system that lets volunteer teachers from anywhere in the world instantly provide 1:1 help sessions to students in MOOCs, without any scheduling or coordination overhead. TeachNow works by quickly finding an online student to help and putting them in a collaborative working session with the teacher. The spontaneous, on-demand nature of TeachNow gives teachers the flexibility to help whenever their schedule allows. We share our experiences deploying TeachNow as an experimental feature in a six week online CS1 course with 9,000 students and 600 volunteer teachers. Even as an optional activity, TeachNow was used by teachers to provide over 12,300 minutes of 1:1 help to 375 unique students. Through a carefully designed randomised control trial, we show that TeachNow sessions increased student course retention rate by almost 15%. Moreover, the flexibility of our system captured valuable volunteer time that would otherwise go to waste. Lastly, TeachNow was rated by teachers as one of the most enjoyable and impactful aspects of their involvement in the course. We believe TeachNow is an important step towards providing more human-centered support in massive online courses.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: A volunteer teacher initiates the TeachNow process whenever they have spare time. She presses a button and the system finds available students working on assignments at that moment. Students are nudged one by one with an offer for a 1:1 session with the volunteer until a student accepts. It takes less than 5 minutes for a match to be found. Once the student accepts, the student and volunteer teacher are put into a virtual 1:1 session.
• Figure 2: TeachNow sessions over the weeks in the course, starting from Week 2.
• Figure 3: Student course progress and dropout impacted by a TeachNow session.
• Figure 4: TeachNow captures volunteer time that otherwise goes to waste. Most volunteers who were not able to find a student to help immediately went offline instead of doing other teaching activities.