Manuel Leon Urrutia

Desafíos en la creación, desarrollo e implementación de los MOOC: El curso de Web Science en la Universidad de Southampton

Massive is one of the distinctive features of MOOCs which differentiate them from other e-learning experiences. This massiveness entails certain possibilities, but also some challenges that must be taken into consideration when designing and implementing a Massive Open Online Course, in relation to context, work progress, learning activities, assessment, and feedback. This document presents an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the massive aspect of MOOCs, and specifically it narrates the experience of creating a MOOC on Web Science, developed at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) using the new FutureLearn platform, in autumn 2013. In this document, the importance of Web Science as an emerging field is analyzed and its origins explored. The experience gained from the decisions and the work progress developed for the creation and implementation of a specific MOOC is also shared here. The final section of the paper analyses some data from the MOOC in Web Science, including the participation index, the comments and interactions of some participants, tools used, and the organization of facilitation. Challenges involved in running a MOOC related to course design, platform use and course facilitation are also discussed.

MOOCs in Higher Education Magazines: A Content Analysis of Internal Stakeholder Perspectives

Higher Education magazines have echoed the rapid spread of MOOCs in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) since 2012. In their pages, MOOC related articles are proliferating. The focus of such articles has often been the disruptive nature as well as the survival of this new form of open online education, especially the first years. However, there is also a great deal of mentions of how internal stakeholders in HEIs perceive the advent of MOOCs. These perceptions are the object of analysis in this article. Using the Content Analysis (CA) method, MOOC related sources in three Higher Education magazines during 2014 have been analysed against a set of key themes. These themes have been established by combining data from two previous studies: a Content Analysis of MOOC related academic literature, and a set of interviews to internal stakeholders using grounded theory. As the findings indicate, in 2014 the main concerns of internal stakeholders have been the new teaching practices and new work dynamics resulting from the incorporation of MOOCs in their working routines. It is argued that educational media no longer focuses on the debate of the future of MOOCs. Rather, the debate is on how MOOCs should be best implemented from a practitioner’s perspective.

FutureLearn data: what we currently have, what we are learning and how it is demonstrating learning in MOOCs

Compared to other platforms such as Coursera and EdX, FutureLearn is a relatively new player in the MOOC arena and received limited coverage in the Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining research. Founded by a partnership between the Open University in the UK, the BBC, The British Library and (originally) 12 universities in the UK, FutureLearn has two distinctive features relevant to the way their data is displayed and analyzed: 1) it was designed with a specific educational philosophy in mind which focuses on the social dimension of learning and 2) every learning activity provide opportunities for formal discussion and commenting. This workshop provides an opportunity to invite contributions and connect individual and groups to share their research activities on an international stage. As the first of its kind, this workshop will bring in a number of scholars and practitioners, as well as data scientists and analyst involved in the reporting, researching and developments emerging from the data offered by the platform.

Humour reactions in crisis: a proximal analysis of Chinese posts on sina weibo in reaction to the salt panic of march 2011

This paper presents an analysis of humour use in Sina Weibo in reaction to the Chinese salt panic, which occurred as a result of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. Basing the investigation on the humour Proximal Distancing Theory (PDT), and utilising a dataset from Sina Weibo in 2011, an examination of humour reactions is performed to identify the proximal spread of humourous Weibo posts in relation to the consequent salt panic in China. As a result of this method, we present a novel methodology for understanding humour reactions in social media, and provide recommendations on how such a method could be applied to a variety of other social media, crises, cultural and spatial settings.