MOOC Movers and Shakers: Who is Setting the Agenda? [1540] Members : #OER17

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Thu, Apr 6 2017, 2:50pm – 3:50pm

Authors: Mairead Nic Giolla Mhichil, Mark Brown, Eamon Costello, Theo Lynn, and Binesh Nair

Room: Conf. Hall

Theme: Policy & Practice

Type: Presentations

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Description

Agenda setting is a core area in theories of mass communication and policy analysis, where the agency of actors in the process of persuading, setting or establishing a particular agenda is well-theorised. Within communication theory the agency of the media, traditionally, considered as the role of the sender is a vibrant area of research. New media including social media broadened the notion of the sender to include micro-level actors (McMillan, 2002). The policy literature focus of research is roughly divided into studies of either bottom-up or top-down actors and networks influencing the policy process. This paper presents a study of Twitter actors and their discourses in the context of MOOCs and is conceptually grounded in ideographic notions of the policy process. Twitter users applying a hashtag are classified as agentic implementers, shaping and reshaping agendas or policy texts (Trowler, 2002), by deliberately identifying the “aboutness” of tweets using the hashtag “MOOC”. Tweets with #MOOC are conceptualized as writerly policy texts, constructed by agentic actors as part of an iterative and active participation in the agenda setting process. This paper encapsulates the themes of OER 17 of open politics and local policy practice of micro-implementers.

Participants of the conference will be presented with findings from a 2015 Twitter dataset, which identifies the agentic implementers. Furthermore, they will be provided with a critique of the term MOOC and its constructions from the empirical data. Using data analytics and discourse analysis the study explores the #MOOC-related discourses of these implementers and the agendas which were constructed and pursued within the Twittersphere using this hashtag. Findings indicate that social media containing the #MOOC identifier, when conceptualized as an information network (Myers et al, 2014), is dominated by macro-level actors i.e. course and platform providers. However, when a social network frame of analysis is adopted the dataset reveals individuals who are influencing the #MOOC agenda e.g. researchers and educational commentators, supporting the notion of a subculture of scholarly networks referred to as “academic Twitter” (Stewart, 2017). Significantly, the low presence of teachers and learners in the #MOOC dataset is contrary to assumptions of previous research (Shen & Kuo, 2015). This finding prompts further research to investigate Twitter’s use and MOOCs to support learning and teaching.

References

McMillan, S. J. (2002). A four-part model of cyber-interactivity: Some cyberplaces are more interactive than others. New Media & Society, Vol. 4 (2), pp.271- 291.

Myers, S. A., Sharma, A., Gupta, P., & Lin, J. (2014). Information network or social network? : The structure of the twitter follow graph. Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 493-498). ACM.

Shen, C.W., & Kuo, C.J. (2015). Learning in massive open online courses: Evidence from social media mining. Computers in Human Behavior, 51, pp.568-577.

Stewart, B. (Forthcoming, 2017). Academic Twitter & academic capital: Collapsing orality & literacy in scholarly publics. The digital academic: Critical perspectives of digital technologies in higher education, D. Lupton, I. Mewburn & P. Thomson, (Eds). London: Routledge.

Trowler, P. (2002). Introduction: Higher Education Policy, Institutional Change In: TROWLER, P. (ed.) Higher Education Policy and Institutional Change: Intentions and Outcomes in Turbulent Environments. Buckingham, SRHE & Open University Press.

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