Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Exploring Class Discussions from a Massive
Open Online Course (MOOC)
on Cartography
Anthony C. Robinson
Introduction
The recent emergence of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has become a
transformative force in distance education. MOOCs are designed to provide class
experiences that scale elegantly to tens of thousands of students working online
(McAuley et al.
2010
). MOOCs are normally delivered through dedicated content
management platforms that host lecture videos, written/graphical content, assess-
ment tools, and discussion forums. These platforms also capture student interac-
tions and contributions, which form a massive dataset worthy of exploration after
the course has ended. In 2013, we designed and delivered a MOOC on the
fundamentals of Cartography called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. This
course enrolled over 48,000 students from more than 150 countries for its first
5-week session beginning in July, 2013.
In this paper we highlight the potential for discussion archives and other
qualitative contributions from students in courses like Maps and the Geospatial
Revolution to reveal interesting patterns about what diverse audiences think about
cartography. Students enrolled in our MOOC generated over 95,000 forum posts in
more than 13,000 threads. Weekly discussion prompts urged students to focus on
geospatial privacy, mapping change, mapping hazards, mapping social media, and
telling stories with maps. In addition to those prompted topics, students started
discussions on nearly every other aspect of mapping (and the course itself) that one
might envision. Since this corpus is impossible for one to readily make sense of, it
serves as excellent fodder for text analysis using visual and quantitative methods to
uncover key topics and to explore the places that were used to explain those topics.
Here we show how visual methods such as Phrase Nets (van Ham et al.
2009
)
can be applied to reveal how students say they use maps. We also highlight how
