TeachNow: Enabling Teachers to Provide Spontaneous, Realtime 1:1 Help in Massive Online Courses

One-on-one help from a teacher is highly impactful for students, yet extremely challenging to support in massive online courses (MOOCs). In this work, we present TeachNow: a novel system that lets volunteer teachers from anywhere in the world instantly provide 1:1 help sessions to students in MOOCs, without any scheduling or coordination overhead. TeachNow works by quickly finding an online student to help and putting them in a collaborative working session with the teacher. The spontaneous, on-demand nature of TeachNow gives teachers the flexibility to help whenever their schedule allows. We share our experiences deploying TeachNow as an experimental feature in a six week online CS1 course with 9,000 students and 600 volunteer teachers. Even as an optional activity, TeachNow was used by teachers to provide over 12,300 minutes of 1:1 help to 375 unique students. Through a carefully designed randomised control trial, we show that TeachNow sessions increased student course retention rate by almost 15%. Moreover, the flexibility of our system captured valuable volunteer time that would otherwise go to waste. Lastly, TeachNow was rated by teachers as one of the most enjoyable and impactful aspects of their involvement in the course. We believe TeachNow is an important step towards providing more human-centered support in massive online courses.