activeparticipants, passive participants, drop-ins, lurkers/observers”, and “no-shows”
I personally prefer this categorisation. Having been a teacher at a project school where the non-performing students were dump who didn't perform in normal schools have taught me patience and kindness needed to deal with this learners. They are already stigmatised as failures and some often act to proof a point while others just need attention.
Lurkers, who are also known as silent learners, observers, browsers, read-only participants,vicarious learners, free-riders, witness learners, or legitimate peripheral participants (our preferredterm), tend to be hard to track in a course because of their near invisibility
There are various reasons for lurking behind. Some maybe due to learning difficulties, attention seeking, no interest or just general laziness. However, no matter the reasons, we as educators must attempt to pull this learners through with the rest to make a difference.
a liminal space where lurkers, novice learners, are looking to make sense of the MOOC by observing and practicing skills and behaviours that are associated with active participation
I am totally agree with this, for you to learn something on it, first observe but definitely after observation then participate.
Scale in many ways became a distraction, one which was magnified to such a degree by the hype around MOOCs in edtech that anything less that 10s of thousands of “users,” “learners,” “participants,” followers,” etc. was tacitly considered somehow less than optimal for effective online learning
What about the lurkers?
a liminal space where lurkers, novice learners, are looking to make sense of the MOOC by observing and practicing skills and behaviours that are associated with active participation
Another important point and highlights that there are many different reasons or rationales for being a lurker.
This might suggest a need for learners to have the freedom to lurk, and to determine for themselves what interactions are valuable, and which ones are not. Walker et al. (2010) suggest that in order for lurkers to modulate their behaviours and go from not posting to posting in the context of an online class, the instructor, or the facilitators of the class, needs to provide appropriate external motivators, in other words provide an answer to the common question of “what’s in it for me?”.
This is both a design consideration and an acknowledgement that all learners have agency and the ability to disengage and opt out. Based on my experience leading online work, and my interest in complexity theory, I think it might be useful to determine a set of "worst practices" for fostering community participation in order to establish an ethos for leaders and to allow for novel discovery, which the introduction of "best practices" can discourage.
They further elaborate that lurkers have different motivations and behaviours as compared to individuals who are posters in a community.
Understanding the motivations of learners is really vital. The digital footprint of online collaboration allows us to study interactions and ask questions about motivation.