Monitoring a Learning Community in a Hybrid Environment: A Sentiment Analysis

Ilaria Merciai (ilaria.merciai@unina.it)Marco Cerrone (marco.cerrone@gmail.com)

University of Naples Federico II

Anderson ,T.(2004), TeachinginanOnlineLearningContext,inTheoryandPrac-ticeofOnlineLearning,AthabascaUniversity.Bogliolo,A.,DeRosaR.(2016).Teaching toteachers:AMOOCbasedHybridApproach.PaperpresentedattheEdenConference2016Cambria,E.,Schuller,B.,Xia,Y.,&Havasi,C.(2013).NewAvenuesinOpinionMiningandSentimentAnalysis.IEEEIntelligentSystems,28(2),15–21.doi:10.1109/MIS.2013.30DeRosa,R.,Kerr,R.(2016)OutoftheFishbowl:TowardtheUberization ofTeach-ing.Proceedingsof“Wow!EuropeembracesMOOCs”Rome2015Siemens,G.,Downes,S.(2009).Elearnspace.Retrieved fromhttp://www.elearnspace.org/blogWen,M.,Yang,D.,&Rosé,C.P.(2014).SentimentAnalysisinMOOCDiscussionForums:Whatdoesittellus?PaperpresentedatEDM2014.Retrievedfromhttp://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.660.5804&rep=rep1&type=pdfTools:Netvizz,https://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/andT-lab,http://tlab.it/

As Facebook publishes figures showing that social networks have reduced the degree of separation of people on the planet from 6 to 3.7, it is a platitude to say that they arepowerful communication tools. However, the literature on their impact within MOOCs is still emerging, where the learning community already resides within its own spaceon the MOOC platform and where teaching units are accompanied by a forum for requesting clarification or information.In a recent MOOC on the EMMA platform (www.europeanmoocs.eu), “Coding in your classroom, now”, Facebook was used as an additional learning environment, to postand share information on content related to the course, to comment lessons and assignments, or simply to share a common experience and outcomes.The user-community network that has developed around the course has grown from the 6,000 learners enrolled on the course to reach a population of 100,000.The community started to exchange information about their area, schools and classes, and to use the learning experience on the MOOC to share and build knowledge andeven plan meetups in their local area. Sentiment analysis, with keywords, online expressions, concepts, contexts, shows that socials acted as a powerful tool not only fordissemination of the course but also for informing thousands of people about the innovative features the Emma platform was experimenting.Last but most importantly, they became a powerful tool for sharing best teaching practice in the field. This work presents an exploration of the learning community on thiscourse and evidence for some of the observations we make, trying to understand what impact this hybrid model of MOOC delivery has on the creation of the learningcommunity and student engagement.

ABSTRACT

3.RESULTS 4.CONCLUSIONS

2.METHODOLOGYThe EMMA platform (www.europeanmoocs.eu) launched the MOOC “Coding inyour classroom, Now”, created by professor Alessandro Bogliolo to help teachersintroduce their classes to computational thinking through coding.The course attracted over 4,000 users in its first 10 days, and they behaved as acommunity:

• exchanginginformationabouttheirarea,schoolsandclasses,• usingthelearningexperienceontheMOOCtoshareandbuildknowledge,• planningmeetups intheirlocalarea.

This high number of learners on an adaptive course has presented interestingchallenges and specific learning experiences in a series of loops at all levels of theMOOC delivery process - for the platform, for the tutors, for the teacher and forthe learners. We carried out text analysis on the conversations between Facebookgroup users to study the way that learners respond to the situation, the course andthe learning activities, many of which are completely new. And also to explore theway that teachers and tutors present and respond to situations and learnerenquiries and communications.

In the analyzed FB group we sawthat posts were mainly aboutsharing links, closely followed byphotos of analog situations whereteachers are using skills/knowledgethey acquired on EMMA with theirown classes (see fig. 1). So acombination of sharing of materialswhich are considered to be ofinterest to the group, and photoswhich share their experience (self-congratulatory use of photos, butalso useful for the group becausethey illustrated diverse classroomscenarios which could be copiedand implemented by the otherteachers.

Our analysis refers to contributions fromlearners in the EMMA virtual classroomand to the Facebook Group “Coding inyour Classroom, Now!”.We have considered all posts (3,312)and their related comments (14,348)published in the FB group (with 4,097members in the analyzed range), from15 January 2016 (when the MOOC was

5.REFERENCES

1.INTRODUCTION

www.europeanmoocs.eu

Fig.1:Postsandcommentscomparison

Fig.2:TagCloudsComments

Fig.3:Userstypes

Fig.4:HybridEnvironment

created) to 21st April 2016 (3 days after the last lesson of the course started). Datawere extracted using the Netvizz application, then we cleaned and pre-treated thetextual data through T-LAB and analyzed the main keywords related to thecomments. The text corpus of comments comprised 14,720 lexical forms. Of these,we selected those occurring at least 10 times. The result was a list of 1,154keywords that we based our interpretation of data on to try to evaluate learnerattitude. We triangulated the data with the variable time, so producing four tagclouds. For each month we identified key events that the group conversations builtup around.

The tag clouds in fig. 2 show the different combinations of the main keywords foreach month and we have associated to each the main contexts we identified forthe comments.Combining the text analysis (macro level) with observation of individual commentsin which they occurred (micro level) based on our overall corpus database, wewere able to identify 5 categories of users which we termed: beginners, self-congratulatory, performers, meetuppers and testers/sharers (see fig. 3).Furthermore, the data set offers us the possibility to classify the FB participants inthree main categories: teacher, staff and users, which includes the subcategorypeer-reviewers.

all the identified categories, with diverse levels of experience and competence,and led to the emergence of new contexts to encourage learning by doing.Analysis of the conversations helped us to highlight how members of the FB groupattributed meaning to their learning experience through interaction betweenhuman and non-human elements. In fig. 4 we see which links were shared themost in the comments, and that other sites and platforms are recommended tointegrate their learning. These platforms/instruments are important elements forbuilding relationships between users and for encouraging interaction with thematerials. The combination of these diverse elements resulted in the creation of ahybrid learning environment, where numerous online and offline elementsinterconnect, creating a dynamic and engaging context for learning.

The exploration of the learningcommunity on this course led usto understand the impact that thishybrid model of MOOC deliveryhad on the creation of the learningcommunity and studentengagement. Our analysis showedhow Facebook helped inresponding to diverse needs ofsuch large numbers of learners, in