Abstract
Online courses are growing in popularity in the forms of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs), and flipped classrooms. Some MOOC interfaces provided by websites like Coursera, edX, Khan Academy and Udacity allow students to comment on lectures, but they do so using a different component than that used for consuming lecture content. Their comment systems are effectively message boards linked to by lecture pages. This component separation has been shown to create a cognitive overhead for students. Additionally, comments made in these systems typically apply to the lecture as a whole rather than to more finely-grained lecture content. Some SPOC interfaces allow fine-grained, timeline-based comments, but suffer from a "seeding" issue in which students who view the lecture early lack incentive to participate. Our system, the "Small Private Online Course Keeper" (SPOCK), is an online lecture environment for SPOCs. SPOCK is distinguished by (1) its tight integration between timeline-based lecture content and anonymous student questions, answers, and comments, (2) its use of gamification to encourage student interaction and address the seeding issue, (3) and by its loose coupling with lecture videos, which may be referenced from other websites like YouTube.