Understanding the motivation in massive open online courses: a Twitter mining perspective

摘要

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are attaining recognition world-wide, but their effectiveness in terms of retention is questionable. Several studies have established that motivation is the key to retention in MOOCs. However, a few studies have used social media text analysis to understand the perception of users towards motivation on MOOCs and how MOOC providers engage and motivate their students. This paper uses text mining of motivation related Twitter data on MOOCs to discover the temporal trends, user sentiments, association rules, influencer analysis, and engagement analysis on Twitter. It is found that the users have positive attitudes towards MOOC motivation, and the entities which influence the users are the popular users on Twitter. Furthermore, the MOOC providers engage and motivate the users in the form of motivational quotations, facilitating to ask questions, and sharing experiences. The implications based on the findings are discussed for MOOCs, users, and the government.