genre, MOOCs, computer-mediated discourse, textual participation, participatory frameworks, posting,question-driven discussion forum, superparticipation, superposters, threads

The paper reports on a study of the genre which has evolved in higher education in response to new communication technologies: massive open online courses (MOOCs) are new-media Internet-based teaching programmes aimed to instruct thousands of students simultaneously and referred to as large-scale pedagogy using the strategies of social-networking websites. MOOCs are viewed as intelligent (self-) tutoring systems in which learning is an integral aspect of situated social practices and which enhance socially distributed knowledge. The degree and intensity of engagement in social practice is embedded in the concept of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) which is implicated in MOOCs as a type of socially structured landscape involving (non)hierarchical relations between participants. Drawing on socio-pragmatic concepts of interaction and computer-mediated discourse analysis of textual participation in social media (Chovanec & Dynel, 2015; Graham & Wright, 2014, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2016), main types of participatory frameworks (student/mentor/educator) are explored and posting behaviours are identified in a corpus of two MOOCs? question-driven discussion forums. Focusing on superparticipation, superposters counted for 36 % of all users and were responsible for 65 % of all posts. Posting patterns reveal that 82.36 % of all posts were part of threads, but, interestingly, 62.19 % of threads consisted of 2 posts only.