MOOCs, my PhD, and a couple of small requests

So much has happened since my last post, where to start! The past year has flown by. For most of 2014 I was on maternity leave, but I did take a couple of MOOCs, completing my first edX courses. I also started the MOOC research literature browser to help out anyone writing a thesis or paper on MOOCs – many thanks to everyone who has got in touch to recommend additional papers.

Recently, I’ve started data collection for the main part of my PhD (which is not about MOOCs, but academic social networking online – if you’re interested, do check out my recent paper in First Monday). This is going to keep me very busy for the foreseeable future – and I have two small favours to ask:

• Contribute to the MOOC literature browser: I’m not going to be able to keep up with new MOOC-related publications as quickly, so I’ve set up a Google form to allow you to add information about new papers. Contributions won’t be ‘live’ immediately but by submitting all the information this way, I can just copy everything straight into the live database in batches once a week.
• Take part in my PhD study: I’m currently running an online survey about academics’ use of social networking sites and social media, which you would be welcome to take part in! It is open to academics from any disciplines and job positions, including PhD students. There is also the option to participate in further activities using network visualisations. The survey will be open until the end of January and can be found here: https://openuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/sns

Many thanks if you can help out on either count 🙂 Finally, in case you were curious (I was!), this is what you get if you put all of the abstracts from the 256 items currently in the MOOC research browser into Wordle:

No prizes for guessing the big ones! Thanks again and have a great festive season 🙂

So long and thanks for all the MOOCs!

This is likely to be my last post for a while as I’m embarking upon a new project – parenthood! (There isn’t a MOOC for that!).

My partner Tom and I are expecting the imminent arrival of a baby girl. So I (probably) won’t be blogging actively for a little while, but I wanted to write a post to say a big thank-you to everyone who has read and contributed to my blog. It started out as a place for me to jot down things which I found interesting about MOOCs as I got involved with them as a learner, and as it happened, lots of other people were interested too – particularly when I started (just out of curiosity) looking at completion rates. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed data to my chart, and all the folks who took this as a starting point for interesting debates about openness of data, what completion means in the context of MOOCs, and bringing an evidence-based perspective to the MOOC hype. I’d never intended the chart to be some kind of MOOC league table, but rather I view it as a starting point for engaging with questions about how completion rates could be enhanced in order to make access and achievement more equitable. I might be a bit slower to add things to the chart, but please do continue to comment and contribute data 🙂

The blog has also made a contribution to the academic body of work related to MOOCs; I’ve got a journal paper based on trends in MOOC enrolment and completion currently in press and due for publication in the next issue at the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), and have recently finished my part of a MOOC Research Initiative project grant I hold with my supervisor entitled “Characteristics and completion rates of distributed and centralised MOOCs”. Martin recently presented our work-in-progress at the MRI conference in Texas (I would have loved to have gone, but was too far along with the pregnancy to be allowed on a plane!); he’s been blogging about the work he presented from the project here, and has set up a blog for the learning design part of the project here. I’ll post links here to more project outputs as they happen further down the line.

Bye for now – many thanks once again and have a great festive season – and keep on MOOCing 🙂

Edit: 25th February 2014

My paper in IRRODL is out now! Jordan, K. (2014) Initial trends in enrolment and completion of massive open online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15(1), 133-160.

Edit: 6th April 2014

I’ve written up my work on networks of co-studied subjects as a short paper, which has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (IJET). It’s due to be published in August, and will post a link here when it comes out.

I’ve also started putting together a MOOC research literature browser, using the same tool (Exhibit) as I used for the completion visulisation. It’s a work in progress, and am still populating the citations and tags etc. The search box will search across all the abstracts (when I finish adding them 😉 which is quite handy too. Again, works best in Firefox and Safari. If you’d like to suggest any papers to add which aren’t currently included, please do post a comment here with the info and I will add them 🙂

Adventures in vicarious learning with Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

I’ve recently finished a MOOC on ‘Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative’, which ran from 9th September to 21st October from Vanderbilt University (via Coursera). This one had found its way into my list of courses not for particular career relevance or utility, but it had just piqued my interested because I am a bit of a fan of World of Warcraft (which, ironically, has been rather neglected since I started studying MOOCs in my spare time instead!).

Edward Burne-Jones – The Briar Wood

Anyway, it had been on my course list for ages and coincided with me being rather busy, but I thought I’d give the first week a go and see how it went. And I was hooked! The MMORPG in focus was not World of Warcraft, but Lord of the Rings Online. The course was quite diverse; using Tolkiens’ first Lord of the Rings book as a starting point and anchor throughout, the course explored game formats, media studies, pre-Raphaelite art, and Romance literature. It was fascinating, and I have no idea how I would be able to study such a unique topic if it wasn’t for this MOOC. I think, out of the broad range of topics included in the course, at its core the course was primarily an English Literature course. This is not something that I would necessarily go out of my way to study, but in combination with the other topics, was compelling. It was a powerful reminder of the value of MOOCs of being able to experience a wide range of subjects with no negative consequences if you discover that actually you aren’t so fond of a subject, and might discover you really enjoy something unexpected.

The fellowship of the MOOC

As well as the appeal of the topics covered by the course, there were two other things which made this course a winner for me. The instructor, Professor Jay Clayton, clearly loves the subject and his enthusiasm was infectious (even mediated by the internet!). The course contents were still delivered by video, but mainly used an approach which I’d not seen before in a MOOC. Rather than being lecture-like, most of the videos were based on more of a tutorial type format (see thumbnail), where Professor Clayton was joined by several graduate students in a discussion about the topic in focus. This format really worked for me; I found it to be much more engaging than just a lecture. The students brought their own examples which enhanced the discussion, and seeing the turns in discussion which led to a shared understanding was much more useful than simply being given one opinion. (At least that’s what it felt like to watch – it may have been completely staged for all I know!) Although it might not be to everyones’ taste, I found this kind of vicarious learning very valuable and it is something which I’d like to see more of. I’d be interested to hear about any other examples of approaches in MOOCs which have used video in innovative ways which do not simply replicate the lecture model – if you’ve experienced any other innovative approaches please do leave a comment 🙂

Visualising the network of co-enrolled course subjects

Have you ever wondered which MOOC courses students study together? I’ve been thinking recently about whether MOOC students choose to enrol in combinations of courses from the same subject area, or are more interdisciplinary in their studies.

To look into this, I looked at the combinations of courses listed on public Coursera profile pages. I collected the information in a spreadsheet and (using Gephi) made a network graph – where nodes represent courses, and a link is present if a student has enrolled on both courses (by doing this, the data is anonymised and doesn’t contain any information about students or links to their profiles). The links are weighted so that the more students who took these two courses together, the thicker the link is. I used the modularity algorithm in Gephi to try to detect communities within the network, and colour-coded the nodes to reflect this.

Thanks to a handy plugin for Gephi from Oxford Internet Institute, I’ve been able to create an interactive, online version of the graph to share, which you can view here (opens in a new window).

The challenge of meaningfully assessing discussion participation

Since my last MOOC course update (E-learning & Digital Cultures), I’ve completed four more courses, including: Introduction to Communication Science (University of Amsterdam); Social and Economic Networks (Stanford, Coursera); Infographics and Visualization (Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas); and ‘Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom’ (New York Museum of Modern Art, Coursera). I chose to study some because of relevance to my work, and others just out of interest and curiosity. All were enjoyable and interesting courses overall. I’m not going to go into detail about the first two courses as they both followed the now fairly standard model of video lectures and multiple choice questions, but going to focus on the second two as these are the first MOOCs I’ve taken which require forum participation in the way the courses are assessed.

The Infographics and Visualization MOOC started in mid January and lasted for six weeks. It was my first non-Coursera MOOC (the Communication Science one was also independent of a MOOC platform, but this started later), and used Moodle as its virtual learning environment. The following criteria needed to be met to gain a certificate (in addition to paying $30 – it was also the first and only certificate I have shelled out for):

• Week 1: Participated in the discussion by posting at least twice in the following forum: Critique a graphic forums. Submitted Quiz 1 with at least an 80% correct.
• Week 2: Participated in the discussion by posting at least twice: Critique a graphic forums. Submitted Quiz 2 with at least an 80% correct.
• (Week 3: Participation in forums was not mandatory this week.)
• Week 4: Participated in the discussion by giving feedback to at least three of your classmates’ projects. Submit your project link about tenure (assigned in week 3) in the designated forums.
• Week 5: Participated in the discussion by giving feedback to at least three of your classmates’ final projects. Submit your project link about personal taxes (assigned in week 4) in the designated forums.
• Week 6: Participated in the discussion by giving feedback to at least three of your classmates’ final projects.

After the first couple of weeks, students were required to post links to projects they had undertaken according to various briefs, however these weren’t formally peer graded – as long as you posted something, and posted comments about the work of at least three others, this met the assessment criteria. It became quite difficult quite quickly to keep up with the discussion forums, and my inbox was deluged with forum post notifications. I soon gave up any hope of being able to keep up, and adopted a strategy of being a bit of a forum ninja, sneaking in and posting the required number of comments and giving up on the possibility of returning to the discussions. I suspect that other students were also using the same approach, as I didn’t think that the comments posted about my work were as useful or considered as peer reviews I’ve received via Coursera generally have been.

The Art & Inquiry course used a similar mix of assessments; to gain a certificate, students were required to achieved over 70% across automated quizes (two quizzes, combined weighting of 25%), forum posts (four topics, combined weighting 25%), and a peer assessed project (50%). It wasn’t made clear exactly how the forum participation was assessed, although the general impression was that as long as you posted the required number of times, you would satisfy that part of the assessment criteria. From the outset, the course set out with an ethos of rewarding active engagement; “your success in this course is based on your level of engagement and participation, and not on memorizing facts or grades.” (course site overview text).

I think that this is an admirable goal, but not sure that simply counting whether students have made a required number of posts is really assessing this. Assessing collaboration and interaction with students is still a very open challenge for MOOCs. Is it simply not achievable at this scale, and not a realistic part of ‘MOOC pedagogy’? Or does it require thinking and development of solutions beyond the e-learning tools (such as forums) which have served smaller distance learning courses well, but struggle to scale up? The jury is out for me at the moment – I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about alternative ways of assessing this in MOOCs 🙂

Something else which the Infographics and MoMA courses have in common is the fact that the classes are not archived – both course sites and materials becoming inaccessible shortly after the courses ‘ended’ (the MoMA course site is still accessible at the moment, but says it will close after a month). This seems to be happening more frequently with Coursera – for example, I was enrolled on a course on Systems Biology, which I’d not been ‘actively’ engaged with, but wanted to dip into the materials at my own pace later in the summer in preparation for a course on Network Analysis in Systems Biology. However, the course site promptly closed at the end, and this hasn’t been possible. This is a bit at odds with the ‘Open’ in MOOC, and not very helpful for students auditing the materials.

Edit 2013-09-21: Recently I’ve read two other blog posts asking important questions about MOOC discussion fora. See also Alastair Creelmans’ post ‘The silent majority – why are MOOC forums counterproductive?’, and ‘MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?’ from Phil Hill.

A quick look at gender differences in MOOCs

I’ve been having a bit of a Twitter chat today with @dkernohan and @meatyloafy about sources of data for MOOC student demographics, which led to wondering whether the percentages of female and male students in MOOC courses reflects gender differences in traditional university course subjects.

I’d pointed out that gender preferences vary according to course (using the examples of the six Edinburgh MOOCs, in their report here), and David suggested that HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which collects data about UK HE) could be a useful source for comparison.

So, using the six Edinburgh courses as examples of MOOCs, I had a quick go at mapping them on to their related HESA subject areas, and looking at the percentage of female and male students who had studied these fields in the most recent year (2009/2010, using students at all levels of Higher Education) for which data was available. The data for the MOOCs, and their related HESA subject areas, was as follows:

Source: MOOCs @ Edinburgh 2013 – Report 1 and HESA Table 7, Qualifications obtained by level, gender and subject. Click on the table to enlarge.

Raw data can be found in this Google Doc. I wasn’t 100% sure about categorising ‘Critical Thinking in Global Challenges’, but categorised this as Medicine on basis that the instructors are based in Biomedical Sciences.

While there is a bit of variation between the two, overall the figures are remarkably similar, so it would suggest that gender differences in MOOC courses do reflect gender differences in traditional courses and subjects (at least, when considering the six courses shown, and comparing to the UK HE sector anyway).

See also: Sergiy Nesterko, Gender Balances: A look at the makeup of HarvardX registrants

xMOOC? cMOOC? EDCMOOC – E-Learning & Digital Cultures

I’ve been meaning to jot down my notes on the E-Learning and Digital Cultures (EDCMOOC) course for some time; last week, the University of Edinburgh published a detailed report on their Spring 2013 Coursera offerings, which has given me a bit of a prod to write this post.

The course began on 28th January, and ran for 5 weeks. In a sense, it had begun before the start date, as the course team had encouraged students to connect through social media channels in preparation. This had passed me by though as I’d not been paying enough attention to the pre-course emails. It seemed like a nice idea, but on the morning of the 28th when the course formally began, I was a little taken aback by a tweet:

I was a bit troubled by the view that there were already two groups of students, and a perception that the mass of students who had not engaged in the pre-course (including myself) might spoil it for those who were already engaged. It nearly put me off the course right from the start, but I couldn’t resist having a look at the course content which looked too interesting to miss, so I got stuck in.

Somewhere between a cMOOC and an xMOOC

From the word go, this course was a bit different to my previous Coursera experiences, in the following ways:

• There were no video lectures; rather, the course material included videos from other sources via YouTube, and reading materials.
• There wasn’t just one professor at the helm, but a team of five academics.
• All the course materials were made available from the start, not by weekly release of content.
• No weekly assessments – in fact no quizzes at all. The course was entirely assessed by a single peer-graded assignment, the creation of a ‘digital artefact’ in relation to the course themes. The grading rubric was also fairly open to interpretation.
• Strongly encouraged to interact with other students and have discussions – be it via the forums or any social media channels.

Initially, this was a bit disorienting – not because I prefer video lectures and linear progression, but simply because that is what I’ve become used to from my experiences with Coursera so far. However, it was easy to adjust and having the extra flexibility through the materials being ‘live’ from the start and not having weekly deadlines made it much easier for me to fit the course around my other time commitments.

There were some limitations with this arrangement though. Some students pointed out that YouTube videos aren’t accessible in all countries, and you can’t download the videos to watch offline like you can with most Coursera video lectures. It was also easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of social media postings related to the course. Although I didn’t contribute much to the social media discussions, I did find it useful to dip in to the Twitter chat every so often. Across the various communication channels, the course team were quite active in answering questions and contributing to discussions, which was helpful. In this sense, there was much more of a tutor presence despite not having video lectures.

Digital artefacts and assessment

I chose the topic of learning analytics for my digital artefact, as I thought it offered a lot of potential to be set up in terms of the utopia/dystopia course theme. To make my artefact I used Thinglink, a tool for creating interactive images, which I had not used before but had been introduced to through the course. If you’d like to have a look at my digital artefact, it can be found here. From the small proportion of artefacts that I saw (approximately 2,000 artefacts were submitted), the diversity was fascinating; a collection of digital artefacts from the course can be found here.

The digital artefact was a very different assessment model to any of the other MOOCs that I’ve taken to date. It was ‘all or nothing’ – gaining a certificate for the course rested entirely on this one piece of work. However, this pressure was tempered by the fact that as long as you submitted an artefact and carried out peer assessments, you would get a certificate regardless of how your artefact fared in the assessment process.

Given the emphasis that had been placed on participation rather than assessment throughout the course, and that the grading rubric only allowed artefacts to be scored out of 2 (yes, really – 0, 1 or 2 was the range), I was surprised when the course team announced after the peer grading exercise that students with a median score of 1.5 or higher would receive a Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction.

The digital artefact submission process had potential for some security issues, as all you had to submit in Coursera was a hyperlink to your artefacts’ public location online. There is nothing but the honour code stopping students from submitting a hyperlink to anything, whether they made it or not. When the next iteration of the course takes place, there will be an existing body of digital artefacts, hashtagged and easy to find, ‘out there’ already. Two things which could reduce the potential for plagiarism might be: (i) for the platform to record the previously submitted URLs and not allow duplicate submissions; (ii) for students to also submit a short reflective text about their artefact and what they were seeking to achieve (this would also assist in the peer grading process, as some students felt their work had been misinterpreted).

When the certificates were issued, I was also struck by the phrasing of the course description:

It was the inclusion of the bit about it being an “introductory undergraduate-level course” that I found interesting. None of my other Coursera certificates include any statements about the level of the material, and I’d thought throughout that it was essentially a ‘taster’ of the Edinburgh E-learning MSc course.

Final thoughts

For me, the course had its ups and downs, but it was definitely a worthwhile experience overall due to the compelling topics and enthusiasm of the course team. Having a team rather than a single academic I suspect was key to the success of this course structure (but possibly made it more expensive to run?). The emphasis of the course was placed on the ‘digital cultures’ rather than the ‘e-learning’ bit; the course could be improved by readdressing this balance as it left me wishing there had been ‘a bit more’. But maybe that’s the idea 😉

Synthesising MOOC completion rates

Via a combination of thinking about ‘what makes a successful MOOC?’, and looking for a topic for my final project on the Infographics MOOC, I decided to try to pull together the various statistics floating around online about MOOC completion rates. I’m trying to see if any differences emerge on the basis of platform or the assessment methods used.

My draft graph synthesising everything I’ve found so far can be found here: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html Clicking on any of the data points will pull up a bubble with more information about that course, and a link back to the data source.

(note: the interactive version of the chart uses javascript. It has problems with some versions of Internet Explorer; I’ve found it works more consistently with Firefox. If you are having problems, click the pictures below to view screen grabs, although these may not be as up-to-date as the interactive chart).

This is off to quite an interesting start, but I need help sourcing more data and categorising courses according to their assessments.

Courses which I have completion rates for, but need more information about how they were assessed, include:

• 3.091x Introduction to solid state chemistry at EdX, which ended approximately 2013-01

– Used a combination of MCQs and autograding problems sets

• 6.00x Introduction to Computer Science and Programming at EdX, which ended approximately 2013-01

– Used a combination of MCQs and autograding problems sets

• Artificial Intelligence (Sebastian Thrun), ran in Autumn 2011
• Circuits and Electronics, at MITx in 2012 (first time the course ran)

– Used a combination of MCQs and autograding problems sets

• Circuits and Electronics, at MITx/EdX

– Used a combination of MCQs and autograding problems sets

• Computational Investing, Part 1 at Coursera, ended approx 2013-01

– Used MCQs

• Software as a Service, Coursera, ended approx 2012-06

– Used a combination of MCQs and autograding problems sets

• Gamification, Coursera, ended approx 2012-10

– Used a combination of MCQs and peer graded essays

• Introduction to genetics and evolution, Coursera, ended approx 2012-12

– MCQs

• Introduction to Machine Learning (Andrew Ng), 2011

– MCQs and programming assignments

If you studied on any of these courses, please do post a comment here outlining how it was assessed (just MCQs? Peer graded projects? Or something else?). If you know about any other sources of data about MOOC completion rates (how many registered and how many completed) in addition to the ones already in my chart, please do post a comment too (& a link to the data source), and I’ll add them to the chart. Thanks & looking forward to seeing the picture which emerges!

Fundamentals of Online Education: Dude, where’s my MOOC?

After a party on Saturday night, on Sunday I awoke to find not my car missing, but that a MOOC I’d been taking had apparently disappeared. I’d completed the first week of the Georgia Tech course on ‘Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application‘ (FOE), but at the weekend the course was ‘suspended’ after less than a week of its six-week run.

This was a bit of a surprise. Critical accounts of the course and its demise have been circulating (see for example this post outlining in detail the problems with getting into groups, and a critique of the video material here).

Now, I realise I may be a bit of a dissenting voice, but – I didn’t think it was that bad. Not great, but not bad enough to stop.

I agree with the criticism that the groups were chaos; lesson number 1 was that a Google Spreadsheet can’t cut it when you have 40,000 students. However, none of the other Coursera courses I’ve taken before have attempted to get all students interacting, beyond anonymous peer grading exercises. Although I’d not managed to take part in a discussion before the course was cancelled, I was interested to see where it was going and thought kudos for trying. It’s worth remembering that not only had this course not run before, but MOOCs as a whole are still relatively new and there aren’t established ways of doing many things at this scale. This kind of group discussion does appear to be happening successfully in another MOOC I am currently enrolled on, the Infographics and visualisation MOOC at the Knight Center. However, this is at a cost; the course was limited to 5,000 participants at sign-up, and my impression is that only a fraction of these are still actively participating in the course.

The quality of the video lectures was not great, but apart from not being HD or having a talking head as the lecturer goes through the slides, narrated Powerpoints have been common in the other Coursera MOOCs I’ve used. My impression was that the week 1 lectures were particularly dry in order to just get through a wide range of basic concepts, and that it would probably get better as the course went on; I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt, but sadly it doesn’t look like I will find out.

Of course, there is a huge irony in this case as it was a course about developing online courses. I think that there may have been a couple of other factors at play in its demise. It launched on the same day as the University of Edinburgh course E-learning and Digital Cultures (EDCMOOC), which has an overlap in focus, and this invited comparisons from students enrolled on both courses. The EDCMOOC also seeks to get learners actively participating in group discussions, but does so via social media channels. This has been more successful, but has also attracted some criticism from students who would rather not use these channels or find the volume of discussion across several platforms hard to manage – see this post, for example. Maybe finding a way for the platform to better support discussions is something that Coursera needs to work on more generally.

Also, it’s fairly unlikely that in a class of 40,000 everybody will be happy, and there will always be dissenting voices. The biggest disappointment about the course for me was that in the end, after having invested my time in the first week, that the course shut down. I would have much rather seen it regroup and maybe just stick to the videos and multiple choice questions – it was my impression that it was only a beginner-level course anyway. In the discussion forums which remain on the course site, there are many students who would like to see it return and are still keen to learn in spite of the problems. At the time of writing, the course still appears in my list at Coursera, so it remains to be seen whether this is the end.

It also remains to be seen what the extent of the repercussions of a ‘failed course’ will be for Coursera and perceptions of MOOCs more generally. As I’ve got one day left of my Topsy trial, I’ll finish off with a chart of sentiment analysis on Twitter for the keyword ‘coursera’ in the past month, which took a downward dive in the last three days (data collected 2012-02-04, click picture to enlarge):

So in conclusion, I’m not saying that folks should put up with shoddy materials ‘cos it’s free, but rather this example highlights that mainstream MOOCs are still in a kind of ‘beta’ phase – and everyone is learning from it, one way or another, even those who are seasoned e-learning professionals. The next iteration of the course would probably have benefited from the course running to completion, so that more systematic feedback could have been elicited about its whole structure. I really hope that we do see a second run and this experience hasn’t put the instructors (or the other students) off completely.

MOOC buzz in the Twittersphere

In the last couple of weeks, in conversations about MOOCs, I’ve found myself making the point that a year ago we didn’t really use the word MOOC, and while the MOOC platforms were getting organised at that point, no Coursera/Udacity courses had even run. So, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the Twitter data to see roughly the shape of the body of tweets mentioning MOOCs in the past 365 days.

I’ve not played with Twitter data before, but through some quick Googling, I found a few potential tools to do all the hard work for me – Topsy being the one which I found best to work with, and generated the following brief analysis using it.

Number of mentions, per day, in the last 365 days (data collected 22nd January 2013 – click on picture to enlarge):

There has been a definite amplification in the conversation around MOOCs. If we plot the data as monthly rather than daily mentions, a steady linear increase is seen during 2012:

Number of mentions, per month, in t he last 365 days (data collected 22nd January 2013):

The sharp drop off at the end of the graph is an artefact of data collection (i.e. January 2013 isn’t finished yet). If we ignore the last data point (January 2013), there was a slight dip in December, but this may have been a result of the holiday season. So while 2012 may well have been the ‘year of the MOOC’, I don’t think the bubble has burst yet!

Topsy also has sentiment analysis functionality built in, so I couldn’t resist trying it out, although this part comes with a caveat in that I have no idea exactly how the website defines sentiment, so the tool is a bit of a ‘black box’ to me.

Sentiment analysis (data collected 22nd January 2013 – click on picture to enlarge):

General sentiment seems to be positive; although negative spikes are rare, they are more pronounced. To create this chart, Topsy processed 83,158 tweets, 10,407 it deemed to be ‘positive’ and 3,538 ‘negative’ in sentiment. It could be interesting to do a deeper analysis like this to explore trends in the discussion topics surrounding MOOCs.

I also couldn’t resist having a look to see how the Twitter buzz varies around the three main MOOC platforms.

Monthly tweets mentioning Coursera, EdX and Udacity (data collected 22nd January 2013):

Looking at the tweets from January 2012, the Udacity and Coursera tweets are still at a very early stage; the tweets are focused upon news stories about the platforms being founded. Note that EdX was not even on the horizon at this point – rather, January 2012 tweets appear to relate instead to a DJ called EdX.

Anyway – while this has been quite a quick-and-dirty kind of analysis, it sort of captures a bit of the whirlwind and buzz that has surrounded MOOCs in the past year, and the gain in momentum. I wonder where it’ll be this time next year!