Laura A. Pasquini

The Life Between Big Data Log Events: Learners’ Strategies to Overcome Challenges in MOOCs

Big data from massive open online courses (MOOCs) have enabled researchers to examine learning processes at almost infinite levels of granularity. Yet, such data sets do not track every important element in the learning process. Many strategies that MOOC learners use to overcome learning challenges are not captured in clickstream and log data. In this study, we interviewed 92 MOOC learners to better understand their worlds, investigate possible mechanisms of student attrition, and extend conversations about the use of big data in education. Findings reveal three important domains of the experience of MOOC students that are absent from MOOC tracking logs: the practices at learners’ workstations, learners’ activities online but off-platform, and the wider social context of their lives beyond the MOOC. These findings enrich our understanding of learner agency in MOOCs, clarify the spaces in-between recorded tracking log events, and challenge the view that MOOC learners are disembodied autodidacts.

Organizational identity, meaning, and values: analysis of social media guideline and policy documents

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. In this study we analyze social media guidelines and policies across 250 PSE institutions from 10 countries using latent semantic analysis. This initial finding produced a list of 36 universal topics. Subsequently, chi-squared tests were employed to identify distribution differences of content-related factors between American and Non-American PSE institutions. This analysis offered a high-level summary of unstructured text data on the topic of social media guidance. The results include a comprehensive list of recommendations for developing social media guidelines and policies, and a database of social media guideline and policy documents for the PSE sector and other related organizations.

Selective openness, branding, broadcasting, and promotion: Twitter use in Canada’s public universities

Abstract Higher education institutions have embraced social media platforms. Yet, little research has examined the characteristics of institutional social media accounts and the narratives their posts construct for faculty and student life. By investigating these topics, researchers can better understand the actual and potential roles of these tools in contemporary universities. This study focused on understanding how Canada’s public universities use Twitter, reporting descriptive, inferential, and qualitative analyses of large-scale Twitter data. Findings show extensive variability in participation patterns among institutions. Although rhetoric surrounding Twitter suggests an interactive platform, institutions mostly use it to broadcast information and construct overwhelmingly positive representations of institutional life. While the identified representations are partly authentic, they are also incomplete and misleading. Such representations suggest difficulty for students and faculty seeking to use social media to accurately anticipate campus life or to interact online in these spaces.

Towards a methodology of virtually augmenting a knowledge sharing community of practice: A case study of the local food system of Denton, Texas

Observation, interviews, and a pilot study were conducted to identify requirements for social media to support knowledge sharing that will foster organization and growth of the Local Food System (LFS) in Denton, Texas. Due to lack of infrastructure, participants of this grassroots, self-organized, self-sustaining community of practice currently do not have access to physical or virtual space needed to share, retrieve, and archive LFS knowledge. Proposed system design and implementation will be based on completion of a mixed methods community study. Ethnographic techniques for a close-to-home investigation will examine how the existing LFS community operates. The goal is to design an unobtrusive LFS knowledge sharing social media site that is optimized for thoughtful archiving, accessible information retrieval, and lifelong community learning.