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to their education practices into social networking sites
expecting to get clarification and feedback from other
students and even professors in Africa. Furthermore,
we have observed that social media are becoming ac-
tive communication platform in Africa.
Provision of academic instructions and learning
materials through infusion into social media platforms
seems to boost the awareness as well as improve the
participation of non-existing learners to MOOC plat-
forms. We have stimulated coincidental learning that
introduces excerpts from MOOC into social media pro-
files and detected learning activities among users. In
this setup, we have helped the discovery of online uni-
versity courses to users previously unaware of MOOCs.
This paper tries to bring the best possible approaches
in associating MOOC with social media, particularly
to African context. The delivery of a smart MOOC
is subjective to the integration of social computing
together with knowledge sharing among learners and
teachers.
The intervention of social media, mobile devices to-
gether with MOOCs potentially position mobile learn-
ing as a leading contender for overcoming technologi-
cal challenges faced by MOOCs in Africa. However,
caution is advised toward approaches discussed so far,
in fact, users of social media may lack interests in
MOOCs. Mobile learning is also unlikely to handle
cumbersome information. Moreover, methods like
infusion of learning materials into social networking
sites may not be effective because users see social me-
dia as for inter-personal and self-representation, not
precisely designed for serious learning.
7 FUTURE WORK
In the future, we plan to build a prototype model sup-
posed to use social media to enhance user’s learning
experiences. The model incorporates academic in-
structions extracted from MOOC directly into social
media profile to provide users with learning experi-
ences through mobile devices such as smartphones
and tablet computers. The researchers shall in practice
be able to record user’s experience based on the co-
incidental learning simulated by e-learning materials.
Recording of user activities such as likes, comments,
and sharing is critical to determine the level of interest
in learning as well as gaining insight into the effective-
ness of MOOC in social media settings. To evaluate
our system, we plan to conduct a series of user survey
focusing on testing the awareness of MOOCs to so-
cial media users. Feedback will guide us to refine our
approaches and improve the prototype.
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