Interpersonal language in MOOC lectures: comparing a high-rated and a low-rated course

The last ten years have seen exponential growth in the adoption of online lecturing in higher education. Technological advances have made it possible for hundreds of universities to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to millions of students worldwide. As lecturers begin their journey of online teaching, many find MOOC lecture more challenging than other online lecture genres as it is typically pre-recorded, monologic, and asynchronous. In fact, many educational studies reported that MOOCs tend to have an extremely high dropout rate (approximately 87%) due to a lack of interpersonal connection in the asynchronous virtual space. Interviews with students have also revealed that a lecturer’s interpersonal tone is crucial in shortening the psychological distance when they watch the pre-recorded videos. However, the paucity of applied linguistic research on interpersonal language in MOOC lectures means that it is unclear how the interpersonal tone preferred by students can be realised discursively. Therefore, this paper attempts to 1) capture the discursive instances by modelling an engagement framework and 2) identify particularly useful discursive strategies by comparing a high-rated and a low-rated engineering MOOC course from Coursera. The findings show that the lecture of the high-rated course constantly anticipated the putative learners’ state of mind (e.g., joining, leaving, knowledge gap, knowledge fragmentation, difficulty, isolation, frustration and confusion). In order to address these anticipations, he constructed a discourse that performs several interpersonal functions (e.g., salutations, preemptive corrections/instructions, entertaining, community building, relating to familiar scenarios, offering alternatives, motivation, reassurance, empathy and highlighting the rationale). On the other hand, the low-rated course mostly anticipated and addressed ‘knowledge gap’ and ‘difficulty’ but overlooked ‘emotions’. The findings shed light on how lecturers can use interpersonal language in pre-recorded lectures to ensure that students are engaged, which can help increase the completion rate of online courses.