  MOOC participants often feel isolated and disconnected from their peers.
Navigating meaningful peer interactions, generating a sense of belonging, and
achieving social presence are all major challenges for MOOC platforms. MOOC
users often rely on external social platforms for such connection and peer
interaction, however, off-platform networking often distracts participants from
their learning. With the intention of resolving this issue, we introduce
PeerCollab, a web-based platform that provides affordances to create
communities and supports meaningful peer interactions, building close-knit
groups of learners. We present an initial evaluation through a field study
(n=56) over 6 weeks and a controlled experiment (n=22). The result indicates
insights on how learners build a sense of belonging and develop peer
interactions leading to close-knit learning circles. We find that PeerCollab
can provide more meaningful interactions and create a community to bring a
culture of social learning to decentralized, and isolated MOOC learners.
