The impact of the MOOC movement on social networks. A computational and statistical study on Twitter

Esteban Vázquez Cano
Eloy López Meneses
María Luisa Sevillano García

Abstract

This article analyses the impact of the MOOC movement on the Twitter social network. To do so the lexical-semantic impact of 55,511 tweets by ten of the world’s leading platforms offering MOOC courses was analysed using a tf-idf calculation to represent documents in natural language processing.

The Twitter profiles, patterns of use, and geolocation of tweets by continent were also analysed using computational and statistical techniques. The results show that there is no correlation between use of Twitter accounts by MOOC platforms and their number of followers.

The tweets by participants are mainly grouped into two semantic blocks: alert/ excited and calm/relaxed and tweet traffic is often concentrated in the United States and Europe; South America’s percentage is moderate while Africa, Asia and Oceania have little impact. The most frequently occurring words in the tweets are: «learning», «skills», «course», «free» and «online».

Cite this article as: Vázquez-Cano, E., López Meneses, E., & Sevillano García, M. L. (2017). La repercusión del movimiento MOOC en las redes sociales. Un estudio computacional y estadístico en Twitter | The impact of the MOOC movement on social networks. A computational and statistical study on Twitter. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 75 (266), 47-64. doi: 10.22550/REP75-1-2017-03

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Author Biography

Esteban Vázquez-Cano. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Eloy López Meneses. Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla.
María Luisa Sevillano García. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.

Citación recomendada | Recommended citation

Cano, E. V., Meneses, E. L., & Sevillano García, M. L. (2017) . The impact of the MOOC movement on social networks. A computational and statistical study on Twitter. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 75(266). https://www.revistadepedagogia.org/rep/vol75/iss266/14