Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
areas like spatial privacy, natural hazards mapping, and social media mapping
(all of which were discussion themes prompted by the instructor in this
course).
Sentiment analysis is another fruitful potential direction. Students in
MOOCs are expected to help each other, given the fact that no single
instructor (or team of instructors) could possibly interact with each student
individually in a significant way. Some students find this frustrating, while
others take the opportunity to self-organize into study groups to help one
another. We hypothesize that there are likely geographic differences in
students who choose to organize versus those that do not, and that student
sentiment may vary accordingly.
Ultimately there remains much left to do with these data beyond the basic
analysis we have shown here. A larger future goal should be to support rapid
analyses of MOOC data to uncover spatio-temporal patterns of student
activity and interest may serve as critical aids to instructors who are trying
to adapt their class content and assessments to an ever-changing, global
population of students.
Acknowledgements We thank Jan Oliver Wallgr
¨
n for assistance in using GeoTxt.org to
geo-parse the forum data analyzed in this paper.
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