Abstract

Social epistemic cognition (SEC) corresponds to human individual’s cognition and cognitive processes related to epistemic matters when situated in a social context. SEC has a tripartite root in social cognition (that connects human beliefs to externally observable behaviors), epistemic cognition (that connects knowledge to human internal attitudes and cognitive processes), and social epistemology (that manifests the social dimensions of knowledge and the epistemic nature of social interactions). Nowadays, massive open online course (MOOC) has become one of the major venues for knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Given its volume, velocity, and variety, data collected from MOOC participants is essentially characterized as big data; which can reveal much information over a large population of online learners. In this seminar, I will discuss some of the recent findings on SEC based on large-scale learning analytics on Khan Academy and Coursera. In particular, I will present a number of patterns identified from STEM subjects MOOC big data, and discuss their implications to STEM learning.