Assessing the Use of Social Media in Massive Open Online Courses

📝 Abstract

The study explores whether the use of Twitter in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) promotes the interaction among learners. The social network analysis shows that instructors still play a very central role in the social media communication and the communication network between students shrinking over time. The mere use of social media fails to promote learner-learner interaction. More research is needed for understanding learner motivation and how instructional design can help increase their engagement and participation.

💡 Analysis

The study explores whether the use of Twitter in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) promotes the interaction among learners. The social network analysis shows that instructors still play a very central role in the social media communication and the communication network between students shrinking over time. The mere use of social media fails to promote learner-learner interaction. More research is needed for understanding learner motivation and how instructional design can help increase their engagement and participation.

📄 Content

Assessing the Use of Social Media in Massive Open Online Courses Suhang Jiang University of California, Irvine Irvine, US suhangj@uci.edu

Dimitrios Kotzias University of California, Irvine Irvine, US dkotzias@uci.edu

ABSTRACT The study explores whether the use of Twitter in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) promotes the interaction among learners. The social network analysis shows that instructors still play a very central role in the social media communication and the communication network between students shrinking over time. The mere use of social media fails to promote learner-learner interaction. More research is needed for understanding learner motivation and how instructional design can help increase their engagement and participation.
Author Keywords Social Media; MOOCs; Social Network Analysis;
ACM Classification Keywords Computer Uses in Education INTRODUCTION The emergence and development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) reignited people’s interest in online education and pushed it to a new height. Unlike the online education that was provided as a part of an institution’s program, MOOCs provide free open online courses to people all around the globe. The leading MOOC platforms such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity offer free online courses taught by professors from elite universities mainly from North America. The courses range from Computer Science, Mathematics to Economics, History. Hundreds of ongoing courses from a wide range of fields are available for people to enroll. The courses usually consist of video lectures, quizzes, weekly assignment and the discussion forum. It is not uncommon for having over 30,000 students enrolled in an online course. For example, one Computer Science course taught by Andrew Ng attracted over 100,000 students to enroll.
Generally, MOOCs differ from the previous online education in three aspects, i.e., learners do not need to register in any institution; learners can access all the courses for free; there is no credit given for completing the MOOC besides the certificate issued by the platforms [1]. Anyone with Internet connection in the world can access the courses provided by Harvard and Stanford. MOOCs expand the free access to quality learning resources on a much bigger scale than traditional online education. It promises to democratize education and provide educational equity for those who otherwise would not be able to receive a quality education.
The nature of MOOCs incurred higher enrollment and also higher attrition rate than traditional online education. MOOCs expanded at an exponential rate since 2011. The major MOOC platforms such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity have attracted over tens of millions of learners to enroll online courses [12]. Nevertheless, it is estimated that in general, the completion rate of MOOCs is less than 7% [16]. Even among learners who intended to complete a course at the beginning, the completion rate is about 22% [20], which is lower than that of traditional online education (about 67%) [27]. The higher attrition rate of MOOCs compared to the traditional online education may be due to the fact that the learners are from more diverse background, with more diverse education experience and motivations than those enrolled in degree-granting institutions, learners have the freedom to take and drop courses without costs and that the certificate issued by the platforms are not widely recognized. Learners reported that the lack of time, insufficient math background and having no intention to complete as the reasons for their early withdraw from the online courses [4].
To tackle the high attrition issue of MOOCs, we draw literature of traditional online education about the factors influencing the success of online education. Social interaction has been suggested as crucial for sustaining learners in traditional online courses [13]. Learners reported that they did not learn well in online courses because they receive less instructor support and encouragement when taking online courses [13]. Previous research shows that the instructor-student interaction influences students’ persistence in traditional educational settings. Tinto [24] stated that students are more likely to complete their education the more time the faculty gives to the students. Barnett [3] indicate that instructor’s caring, connection, and guidance increases learners’ sense of integration, which in turn influences their intent to persist. Therefore, Jaggars [14] suggested that online courses should ‘incorporate stronger interpersonal connections and instructor guidance than most currently do’.
Literature from online education and MOOCs also show that social interaction and the sense of community is crucial to the success of an online learning community [18]. Social presence strongly predicts learners’ satisfaction of their online learning experience [25].

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.