Evolution of the conversation and knowledge acquisition in social networks related to a MOOC course

Abstract

This paper presents a real case of tracking conversations and participation in social networks like Twitter and Google+ from students enrolled in a MOOC course. This real case presented is related to a MOOC course developed between January 12 and February 8, 2015, in the iMOOC platform, created as result of the collaboration by Technical University of Madrid, University of Za-ragoza and University of Salamanca. The course had more than 400 students and more than 700 interactions (publications, replies, likes, reshares, etc.) retrieved from the social both social networks (about 200 interactions in Twitter and 500 in Google+). This tracking process of students’ conversations and students’ participation in the social networks allows the MOOC managers and teachers to understand the students’ knowledge sharing and knowledge acquisition within the social networks, allowing them to unlock the possibility of use this knowledge in order to enhance the MOOC contents and results, or even close the loop between the students’ participation in a MOOC course and the parallel students´ usage of social networks to learn, by the combination of both tools using adaptive layers (and other layers like the cooperation or gamification like in the iMOOC platform) in the eLearning platforms, that could lead the students to achieve better results in the Learning process.