For an instructor who is teaching a massive open online course (MOOC), what is the best way to understand their class? What is the best way to view how the students are interacting with the content while the course is running? To help prepare for the next iteration, how should the course's data be best analyzed after the fact? How do these instructional monitoring needs differ between online courses with tens of thousands of students and courses with only tens? This paper reports the results of a survey of 92 MOOC instructors who answered questions about which information they find useful in their course, with the end goal of creating an information display for MOOC instructors. The main findings are: (i) quantitative data sources such as grades, although useful, are not sufficient; understanding the activity in discussion forums and student surveys was rated useful for all use cases by a large majority of respondents, (ii) chat logs were not seen as useful, (iii) for the most part, the same sources of information were seen as useful as found in surveys of smaller online courses, (iv) mockups of existing and novel visualization techniques were responded to positively for use both while the course is running and for planning a revision of the course, and (v) a wide range of views was expressed about other details.

Peer learning, in which students discuss questions in small groups, has been widely reported to improve learning outcomes in traditional classroom settings. Classroom-based peer learning relies on students being in the same place at the same time to form peer discussion groups, but this is rarely true for online students in MOOCs. We built a software tool that facilitates chat-based peer learning in MOOCs by 1) automatically forming ad-hoc discussion groups and 2) scaffolding the interactions between students in these groups. We report on a pilot deployment of this tool; post-use surveys administered to participants show that the tool was positively received and support the feasibility of synchronous online collaborative learning in MOOCs.