Progress about research

My research question is that “What features of social media can be utilized to help MOOC to improve students’ engagement?” and I plan to access this problem from two aspects: The first point is about existing problems of MOOCs platforms and why those problems block further students’ engagement. Secondly, I would point to the features of successful cases of utilizing social media platforms to promote engagement and participation. In this way, it is easier to investigate what features of social media can be applied to MOOCs.

In this week, I have mainly looked through research papers about this topic. And I find that the engagement problems are more severe in adult learning. Since undergraduates and master students may be pushed by colleges and academic requirement, they are more active participants. And they also can get access to off-line studying resources compared to people who have already worked. Thus, I am considering redefining the objects I will focus on.

Besides, I sort out some of points that may be beneficial for my further research:

1    1.Social platforms themselves can provide individuals more opportunities to engage in formal or informal learning opportunities(Greenhow,2011) The roles of social media in promoting students’ engagement were highlighted since it can solve some problematic problems in MOOCs (Zheng et al. 2016 )

2        2.Some researches focus specific platforms and their special functions to engage more students like the hashtags use in Twitter (Veletsianos ,2017). Other researches focus on encoding new form community established online to investigate if the consensus in a virtual community may contribute to better interaction. ( Downes. S. S. 201 0)

       3.Also, problems in MOOCs platforms like the lack of efficient discussion forum and the relative short period of participation in interaction were covered in several researches. Zheng has investigated this problems in terms of psychological reasons behind from the aspects of students, which is very enlightening.

These articles provide some useful insights but my finding is still not very systematic until now. In this case, for the next week, I will continue to read more research papers about students’ motivations of interactions and redefine my scope of research to make it clearer!