Anna Kasunic

Cultural Relevance in MOOCs: Asking About Socioeconomic Context

Existing datasets tell us only a partial story about the contextual factors that impact learners in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Information about race/ethnicity, education, and income helps us understand socioeconomic status, but such data is notoriously difficult to collect in an international context. Extant MOOC studies have not paid due attention to socioeconomic variables; they have either taken a U.S.-centric approach, ignored important country-specific dimensions of variables, or failed to ask about certain variables altogether, such as race/ethnicity. During a qualitative study of 24 self-regulated learners from population groups underrepresented in MOOCs, we piloted a short U.S.-centric demographic questionnaire. Preliminary results suggest that a large-scale survey designed for both cross-national and country-specific analyses would provide valuable information to MOOC researchers.

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

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.

How much of the cocaine market are we missing? Insights from respondent-driven sampling in a mid-sized American city

BACKGROUND Studying markets for illegal drugs is important, but difficult. Data usually come from a selected subset of consumers, such as arrestees, treatment clients, or household survey respondents. There are rarely opportunities to study how such groups may differ from other market participants or how much of total consumption they represent. METHODS This paper uses respondent-driven sampling (RDS) of drug users in a mid-sized American city to estimate the shares of cocaine (powder and crack) users and expenditures that are attributable to different combinations of these groups. RESULTS We find that those arrested in the last year accounted for 34% of past-month cocaine users and 40% of past-week cocaine spending in the RDS sample. Augmenting past-year arrestees with those who received treatment in the past year increases these values to 44% (users) and 55% (spending). CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that estimates based only on people who were arrested and/or treated in the past year would have to be inflated by 100-200% to capture the market totals. Adding those who own or rent their place of residence increased coverage in this study to 76% (users) and 81% (spending), suggesting that in theory the inflation factor could be reduced to 23-32% by supplementing data on arrestees and treatment populations with household data, although in practice rates of under-reporting by survey respondents may make coverage (sampling frame) a secondary concern for household surveys.