Progress about research 2

Following suggestions of the professor, I narrow the scope of study and regard xMOOCs as the object of the literature review. After the discussion with classmates, I found that the components of my research question are not so clear. Since my research question is  “What features of social media can be utilized to help xMOOC to improve students’ engagement?” , I am supposed to make it clear what are the principles and standards of engagement level. So in this week, I mainly focus on the engagement in xMOOCs and conclude some standards according to past research papers.

1. Collaboration and discussion forums

The xMOOCs provide learners a chance to experience co-creation rather than accessing stale catalogs of content( Cormier & Siemens, 2010) and discussion forums are symbols of co-creation.  Integration of social media tools into popular open learning sources may complement the shortage of discussion forums due to its non-anonymous characteristic (Anderi & Vlad, 2014 ). This feature may develop stable dialogue and exist for the longer period of time compare to the short period time of xMOOCs.

2. Virtual communities

Besides discussion of content, establishment of virtual community is also an

important issue. Social networking tools may also connect learners with people who can point them to further learning resources. (Naill Sclater, 2016)  Virtual communities are beneficial for learners who step into a new field. Social media groups can be viewed as the engagement of xMOOCs since it provides knowledge beyond the content itself and contributes to setting up networks for learners.

3. Mention of xMOOCs in own social media pages

There are also some researchers pointing out that frequency of mentioning xMOOCs should be also considered as an important indicator. Most of them focus on specific platforms like the posts on Facebook about a course in Coursera (John M Carroll 2016) or hashtags in Twitter. But I am a little doubtful since the motivation of posts can also be constructing an ideal image in social media. In the next week, I will find some researches related to this topic.

Besides, it is a little ambiguous that the target audience of the xMOOCs. It is reasonable to take the anonymity in online learning spaces. In this case, it is difficult to define some features of audience and learners of xMOOCs. In my sense, I may delve more into the motivation sides of learners to seek about characteristics of the audience in the following week.