This article describes how MOOCs, being a new global education and technology phenomenon, present both opportunities and challenges to educators and learners. The lack of face-to-face engagement introduces a sense of isolation in students, resulting in a high dropout rate. To this end, online forums are deemed to help overcome the problem by enabling interactions among the learners and facilitating their learning. Recent research further suggests that with an online forum provided in a MOOC, the presence of instructors may not be important. However, in this article, the authors provide two important insights: First, online forum indeed plays an important role in motivating learner continuance. Second, among the different types of forum activities, they find that interaction with instructors emerge as an important factor contributing to more assignment completions in addition to forum posting. The authors' post-hoc analysis also indicates that the importance of instructor presence may be particularly salient in the Eastern vis-A -vis Western culture, which points to future research opportunities.

中文翻译：

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讲师与学生的论坛互动在促进MOOC持续性中的作用

本文介绍了MOOC，它是一种新兴的全球教育和技术现象，如何给教育者和学习者带来机遇和挑战。缺乏面对面的参与会给学生带来孤立感，导致辍学率很高。为此，在线论坛被认为可以通过促进学习者之间的互动并促进他们的学习来帮助克服问题。最近的研究进一步表明，借助MOOC中提供的在线论坛，讲师的出现可能并不重要。但是，在本文中，作者提供了两个重要的见解：首先，在线论坛确实在激发学习者持续性方面发挥着重要作用。其次，在不同类型的论坛活动中，他们发现与讲师的互动成为了重要的因素，除了论坛发帖外，还有助于完成更多的任务。作者的事后分析还表明，在东方对西方文化中，讲师存在的重要性尤其重要，这表明了未来的研究机会。