Robab Saadatdoost

Exploring MOOC from education and Information Systems perspectives: a short literature review

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained significance as a new paradigm in education. MOOCs are open to any interested person and provide education products for a scalable number of learners who have access to the Internet. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in MOOCs including their types, theories and challenges. Although this is an important and challenging field for Information Systems researchers, a rich and structural literature review has not yet been conducted in this area. The purpose of this article is to present a short review of recent research into MOOCs. Thirty-two papers were selected for review through four search engines with a search of key terms related to MOOCs. On the basis of this review, a holistic definition on MOOCs is presented and an overview of the relevant theories and issues is provided.

Application of self organizing map for knowledge discovery based in higher education data

This paper focuses on knowledge discovery among attributes of Iran Higher Education Institute using self organizing map (SOM); the key problem with massive volume of data is extracting knowledge and patterns that are hidden in data. Managerial needs to explore this data for the purpose of decision making and strategy making reveals its importance‥ Furthermore it can be useful for researchers that study and research about higher education. Meanwhile planning for higher education has significant impact on developing of one society, successful planning needs to analysis some huge and historical data that is available in higher education institutes. SOM is a particular type of neural network used in clustering and helps discover patterns and relations without advanced knowledge about them. The steps of this approach can be discussed under five headings, which are (i) Data Preparation (ii) Data Loading, (iii) Initializing, (iv) Map training and (v) Interpretation of the results. The target dataset contains data of five universities located in Tehran, Iran affiliated to Medical Ministry of Iran and the most important attributes are program of study, learning style, study mode and degree. Results show that the number of enrolling students for Tehran medical university has decreased for the past 23 years from 1988 to 2005. This study also finds that Tehran University of Medical Science covers the majority of high degrees like MDdisplay(Doctor of Medicine) and PhD. The findings of this study can be used in improving of higher education decision making systems and the results of this study indicate SOM toolbox utility in similar institutes to knowledge discovery in a visualizing way.

Understanding the Setting of a MOOC: A Journey into Coursera

Massive Open Online Courses MOOC are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore in online education. Recent developments in MOOC have heightened the need for understanding the MOOC. The issue of an in-depth understanding of the MOOC setting has been a key subject within the field of qualitative research. However, far too little attention has been paid to the MOOC setting. This paper seeks to put the Netnography methodology into context by presenting a description of the Coursera community to better understand this community. It contributes by providing details about Coursera community through our engagement in this community.

Individual Characteristics and Hacking, Piracy, Online Gambling and Pornography Use among Students: A Study in Malaysia

In this study, 441 Universiti Teknologi Malaysia students participated as respondents. Through a questionnaire respondents were asked how frequently they engage in specific behaviors, including hacking, using pirated software, music and movies in addition to use of gambling and pornography sites. The aim was to investigate which individual characteristics including age, gender, religion, citizenship, level of education, ego strength and locus of control are among determinants of these behaviors. The results of these questions were used to report the ratio of frequent users of these materials based on different categories. Logistic regression was used to see what the influential factors in the investigated behaviors are. The results suggest that males are more engaged with almost all of the investigated behaviors. In addition, citizenship, ego strength, age and religion reflected a statistically significant difference among people in certain activities. Level of education and locus of control did not reflect any significance in engaging in aforementioned behaviors.