skip to main content
10.1145/2876034.2893415acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesl-at-sConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Work in Progress

A Preliminary Look at MOOC-associated Facebook Groups: Prevalence, Geographic Representation, and Homophily

Published: 25 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Although xMOOCs are not designed to directly engage students via social media platforms, some students in these courses join MOOC-associated Facebook groups. This study explores the prevalence of Facebook groups associated with courses from MITx and HarvardX, the geographic distribution of students in such groups as compared to the courses at large, and the extent to which such groups are location and/or language homophilous. Results suggests that a non-trivial number of MOOC students engage in Facebook groups, that learners from a number of non-U.S. locations are disproportionately likely to participate in such groups, and that the groups display both location and language homophily. These findings have implications for how MOOCs and social media platforms can support learners from non-English speaking contexts.

References

[1]
Carlos Alario-Hoyos, Mar Perez-Sanagustin, Carlos Delgado-Kloos, Hugo Parada G., and Mario Munoz- Organero. 2014. Delving into participants' profiles and use of social tools in MOOCs. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies: 8 pages. http://doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2014.2311807
[2]
Pavani Cherukuru, Anil Agarwal, Krishna Chandramouli, and Ebroul Izquierdo. 2014. Learner Centric Enhancement Towards Socio Moodle. In IACEE 14th World Conference on Continuing Engineering Education, Stanford University, Vol 15, Paper 116, 6 pages.
[3]
Christine Greenhow and Cathy Lewin. 2015. Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning. Learning, Media and Technology: 1--25. http://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1064954
[4]
HarvardX. 2015. HarvardX Insights. Retrieved September 9, 2015 from http://harvardx.harvard.edu/harvardx-insights
[5]
Jonathan Huang, Anirban Dasgupta, Arpita Ghosh, Jane Manning, and Marc Sanders. 2014. Superposter behavior in MOOC forums. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference -- (L@S '14), ACM Press, 117--126. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566249
[6]
MITx and HarvardX. 2015. MITx and HarvardX Dataverse. Retrieved August 9, 2015 from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/mxhx
[7]
Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project. Social Networking Popular Across Globe. 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2015 from http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/12/socialnetworking-popular-across-globe/.
[8]
George Siemens. 2013. Massive Open Online Courses: Innovation in Education? Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice. Athabasca University: 5--16.
[9]
Diyi Yang, Mario Piergallini, Iris Howley, and Carolyn Rose. 2014. Forum Thread Recommendation for Massive Open Online Courses. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, 257--260.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Fostering and Understanding Diverse Interpersonal Connections in a Massive Online CS1 CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701912(666-672)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2018)Participating by activity or by week in MOOCsInformation and Learning Science10.1108/ILS-04-2018-0033119:9/10(572-585)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
  • (2017)EduFeedProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998231(491-504)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
L@S '16: Proceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
April 2016
446 pages
ISBN:9781450337267
DOI:10.1145/2876034
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 April 2016

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. facebook
  2. homophily
  3. massive open online courses
  4. moocs
  5. social media

Qualifiers

  • Work in progress

Funding Sources

  • Google

Conference

L@S 2016
Sponsor:
L@S 2016: Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
April 25 - 26, 2016
Scotland, Edinburgh, UK

Acceptance Rates

L@S '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 79 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Fostering and Understanding Diverse Interpersonal Connections in a Massive Online CS1 CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701912(666-672)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2018)Participating by activity or by week in MOOCsInformation and Learning Science10.1108/ILS-04-2018-0033119:9/10(572-585)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
  • (2017)EduFeedProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998231(491-504)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
  • (2017)Going Global: Understanding English Language Learners’ Student Motivation in English-Language MOOCsInternational Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/s40593-017-0159-728:4(528-552)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2017

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media