Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 5 Map of placenames found in MOOC forum posts, aggregated by 2
wide hexagons
While ordinarily it would be inappropriate to use a non-normalized choropleth
map to show these data, in this instance, the raw totals aggregated by country helps
show the general pattern of placename mentions in the class forum that is less
apparent in the hexagonal binning results. Many of the hex bins are located on the
centroids of countries, indicating the mention of a country name in a discussion
forum post. Figure
6
shows the raw totals aggregated to countries, revealing a not
too surprising trend around highly populated, English-speaking countries. The map
does not track overall population trends when one considers Asia and Africa.
These analyses prompted us to think of a way to normalize the data by a
reasonable measure. We found overall population normalization was not particu-
larly interesting, as it simply emphasizes very small population countries that
received a handful of mentions (Greenland and Antarctica, for example). Instead,
we used the “Pin Yourself” mapping activity data from the beginning of the class to
count enrollments by country, and then used those enrollment data to normalize the
placename mentions in our forum data. The resulting map is shown in Fig.
6
. What
is clear from this map is that there are some places that are of greater interest in
discussion than they were in terms of attracting students, and that this is particularly
true in Africa and parts of Asia. Some countries, like Brazil and Australia, were
talked about in discussion frequently, and also constituted sizable proportions of the
overall student population (both appearing in the top ten placename and student
enrollment lists).
