Smart MOOC

Social Computing for Learning and Knowledge Sharing

Ahmed Shams, Raad Bin Tareaf, Jan Renz and Christoph Meinel

Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany

Keywords:

MOOC, E-Learning, Social Computing, Mobile Devices, Ubiquitous Learning, Emerging Adults.

Abstract:

Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs) make use of educational technologies to deliver learning materials,

supposedly open for everyone, usually with a capacity to serve a substantial number of learners regardless

of their geographical locations. A recent advancement in mobile technologies and wireless communications

in Africa has produced a conducive digital environment enough to support mobile learning. However, only

a handful of an audience in Africa participates in online learning correlated to their massive engagement in

social networking. Internet-based social media programs make most of the connections with the audience for

social purposes and yet far less with educational intentions. Participation in mobile learning is still unnoticeable.

Awareness about MOOCs remains very low in comparison to that in social media in the region. Therefore it

remains unclear though, in which ways, social media may help to boost mobile learning through its utilization

of programs towards audience in Africa. This paper argues the best possible approaches aiming to enhance

MOOC activities in Africa through the involvement of social networks.

1 INTRODUCTION

Africa is known for its increasing pace in embracing

mobile devices and wireless communications as the

active mode of communication in recent years. An

enormous number of smartphones, tablet computers,

and other similar mobile devices is being reported in

many African regions. Many mobile devices connect

to the internet at more frequent intervals than ever be-

fore. An average online time per device has increased

well above one hour per day in the last ﬁve years,

leading to high rate of growth of internet users. Mo-

bile devices have rapidly penetrated in many countries,

nearly becoming ubiquitous in Africa in contrast to

the sluggish ownership of PC and laptops (ITU, 2016).

Smartphones and tablet computers in particular, are

becoming a primary tool for informing various aspects

of life to students, professionals, customers, and all

groups of people in general, notably changing the way

students get access to information, communicate with

one another and inform others.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are con-

sidered being successful in Asia, Europe and the Amer-

icas compared to Africa regarding audience awareness,

learner participation and overall achievement in on-

line education. MOOCs often offer university courses

openly to anyone, anywhere with an internet connec-

tion as a primary requirement. Despite the potential

opportunities of free access to distance learning, only

a tiny number of students in Africa registers in Cours-

era, edX, openHPI and other similar primary MOOC

providers since their inception in 2012 (Renz et al.,

2017).

For example, openHPI has registered hundreds of

thousands of learners making it virtually a large univer-

sity through its interactive web-based platform as well

as native apps (Meinel and Willems, 2013). However,

there are relatively low MOOC activities observed in

Africa despite the reported high prevalence of social

media in the region opposite to our expectations of

ﬁnding some signiﬁcant e-learning footprints due to

their high ownership of mobile devices. One of the

reasons for minimum MOOCs activities in Africa is

low recognition of e-learning platforms and other web-

based educational portals compared to those of social

media.

Social media’s high popularity in Africa is boosted

with their known ability to provide functions that en-

able users to create, comment, express opinions and

even share the content with other users in their web-

based platforms or native apps. The digital environ-

ment for supporting populous social media is matching

with the pace of mobile devices penetration as well as

the prevalence of wireless communications in Africa.

Shams, A., Bin Tareaf, R., Renz, J. and Meinel, C.

Smart MOOC.

DOI: 10.5220/0006809703910396

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018), pages 391-396

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

391

A similar conducive digital environment is also avail-

able for online learning. Learning practices where

mobile technologies are used is called mobile-learning

which crosses multiple contexts, through social and

content interactions, using personal electronic devices

with emphasize on time convenience of the learner.

This paper presents social-based approaches aim-

ing to promote online participation in MOOCs via so-

cial media in particular with settings that reﬂect Africa.

Social networking sites consume a large part of inter-

net activities as well as online time among students

while are somewhat far less intended for education pur-

poses but rather inter-personal and self-representation

(Pfeiffer and Ahorlu, 2014). We try to set the non-

formal and perhaps incidental context on Facebook,

YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp and other similar social

media to bring new impulses to e-learning.

2 RELATED WORK

A literature review reveals an increasing ownership of

mobile devices among students as well as the growth of

internet usage in Africa. The impact of mobile devices

together with availability of internet connection sig-

niﬁcantly change the way of acquiring information in

Africa. In recent years, some researchers have studied

the inﬂuence of social media in facilitating education

processes.

A study titled Exploitation of Online Social Net-

works among University Students: A Case Study of the

University of Dodoma conducted surveys and collected

data regarding the nature of content in social network-

ing sites that students engage while in the campus. A

questionnaire survey administered to a sample of uni-

versity students yielded responses that show Facebook,

Twitter, Google+, Blogs, and Wikis are popular in the

university’s premises. Students intensively use Face-

book to communicate, Wikis for references and Blogs

for information retrieval about course work activities

while Twitter for connecting to the lecturers. (Shao

and Seif, 2014).

An exploratory research investigated how students

use social media in Africa. The researcher collected

data relating to educational activities in Facebook plat-

form in Facebook as a learning tool? A case study on

the appropriation of social network sites from mobile

phones in developing countries. The research shows

how users, particular students, appropriate social net-

working sites from their mobile devices as the educa-

tional tool in an informal learning context (Pimmer

et al., 2012).

A different study regarding the inﬂuence of social

media conducted in Asia which reports that importance

of social communication in learning. Data analysis

shows positives of social media in education outweigh

the negatives. A similar study bargains that social me-

dia could promote learning practices where available

information and skills can easily be shared from a lo-

cal community to a global scale (Subrahmanyam et al.,

2008)(Cheung et al., 2011).

Furthermore, a study in Online social networks:

Why do students use Facebook? shows the effect of so-

cial media in academic performance by revealing that

majority of the students who took survey responded

by acknowledging the positive impact of social net-

working sites in their learning. However, they also

pinpointed the negatives of Facebook solely stating it

as a non-educational tool (Cheung et al., 2011).

3 METHODOLOGY

Based on the literature review on the related work sec-

tion, we decided to ﬁrst present statistics involving the

status of ownership of mobile devices, usage of inter-

net and engagement of social media in Africa as well

as the current pace of online learning in MOOCs. We

also conducted two experiments; 1. To determine the

popularity of online learning practices in social media

against non-educational topics. The popularity test is

set up using a web crawler instructed to browse the

entire Twitter website searching for speciﬁc tweets to

determine their frequency. 2. To create new accounts

on social networking sites that contextually loaded

with learning materials borrowed from MOOCs aim-

ing to study user perception based on the incorporation

of MOOC content into social media.

The literature review gathered data that were sta-

tistically analyzed using descriptive statistics like fre-

quencies, percentages and graphs to provide an insight

of MOOCs in relation to social media in Tanzania,

the most populous country in East Africa. The results

of the data analysis are presented in ﬁndings section

followed by discussion section which outlines various

approaches based on the ﬁndings.

4 FINDINGS

This section presents statistics on penetration of mo-

bile phones, usage of the internet, popularity of social

media and status of e-learning in Tanzania. Talks and

online discussions on Twitter website focusing on on-

line learning worldwide are also presented in the last

part of the section.

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4.1 Penetration of Mobile Phones

The provision of ﬁxed wired communications in Tan-

zania homes and schools is currently in stagnation

mode, consequently many students hardly access the

internet via cable or WiFi. Limitation of high-speed

internet connection hinders online learning, particular

in the dissemination process of educational content

and other learning materials. Interestingly, wireless

communications have recorded extensive coverage of

over 80% among 55 million people in the country as

demonstrated in Table: 1. Data from TCRA, a com-

munications agency shows an increasing number of

mobile phones with ownership of 7 in 10 people. Most

subscribers have multiple SIM cards, and over 50,000

of new mobile subscriptions are registered monthly

since 2011 (TCRA, 2017).

Table 1: Summary of communication statistics describing

mobile subscription and tele-density in Tanzania.

Year 2012 2014 2016

Fixed 161,063 142,950 129,597

Mobile

25,827,518 34,108,851 40,044,156

Penetration

61% 71% 80%

Internet penetration rate at the end of 2017 is 40%,

covering 18 million people who mostly use smart-

phones, tablet computers and other similar mobile de-

vices as demonstrated by Table: 2 to access internet. It

is highly practical for a student to own a mobile device

rather than a PC, furthermore the access to the internet

is via a cell tower rather than copper cables or WiFi,

thus making a smartphone apparently a potent tool in

communication. Regarding internet trafﬁc, students

and young adults contribute about 15% of the total

online activities (Renz et al., 2017). Access to social

networking sites, news channels, and entertainment

portals are taking a huge portion of personal time of

most students, with social media alone being the most

frequent online activity (ITU, 2016) (Act, 2014).

Table 2: Summary of internet services by estimated number

of users by technology type in Tanzania.

Type of Service

2012 2014 2016

Fixed Wireless 777,481

1,913,082 1,218,693

Wireless

6,031,323 11,320,031 18,014,358

Fixed Wired 712,095 984,198 629,474

Penetration 17% 29% 40%

4.2 Popularity of Social Media

Social media refer to chatting, text posting, Au-

dio/Videocasting and other activities on social net-

working sites such as Facebook, Twitter and What-

sApp have been served in the country by mobile op-

erators on much-reduced data prices due to lack of

internet neutrality law in Tanzania. The costs incurred

by users for accessing populous Facebook, YouTube

and WhatsApp for instance in the past ﬁve years is

small compared to other websites. As a result, more

students and even professional manage to afford so-

cial networking while only a few retain an opportunity

to reach online educational portals (Marsden, 2012).

This practice has partly contributed frequent searches,

massive installations of native apps and intense use

of social media to smartphone owners as portrayed in

Figure. 1 (Shao and Seif, 2014).

Figure 1: Frequency use of social media among respondents.

Source: Shao and Seif, 2014.

In a survey involving a sample of 60 students from

both rural and urban regions, ﬁndings are that over 90%

of online activities are not related to education context.

Nevertheless, over 80% of those events are happening

in social networking sites (Pfeiffer and Ahorlu, 2014).

Statistics show less than 05% were topics related to

education. Most of the students, however, hinted about

the usefulness of social media for personal use in help-

ing their educational processes. For example, refer-

ence searches, Q&A sessions, sharing of course works,

storage of learning materials and other educational

activities are on rise through social media.

Results from the web crawler in Twitter showed

less than 1,000 tweets related to online learning as well

as MOOC related hashtags were tweeted worldwide in

one hour run as compared to 1,345 tweets discussing

Game of Thrones - an entertainment television drama

series. We also obtained 7,739 tweets for Democ-

racy, 6,051 for Technology and 117,759 for News to

cover different categories of tweets in non-educational

context. The analyzed data is visually presented in

Figure. 2 that shows Twitter users rarely mention on-

line learning (selected hashtags on the right side of the

ﬁgure) in general even when correlated to just a single

TV show program. Furthermore, none of the tweets

were recorded from Tanzania while 221 users were

discussing the non-educational topics such as politics

and sports news. A complete set of crawling results is

Smart MOOC

393

provided in the Github repository

Figure 2: Share of tweets discussing online education cor-

responding to non-educational content such as TV drama

series.

In summary, social media is becoming a ubiquitous

technological stage for discussing various aspect of

life, and have managed to ﬁnd an active user in almost

every mobile device that connects to the internet. On-

line reported events related to entertainment, politics

and interpersonal communications are taking a toll on

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other popular social

networking sites while online educational activities are

far left behind.

4.3 Status of e-Learning and MOOC

MOOCs are still underused, with low recognition

among internet users in Africa, despite its relatively

huge young population. Our popularity test has demon-

strated only a handful of online talks on e-learning and

MOOCs as shown in Figure. 2 above. It is hard to

determine the exact provision of MOOC in Tanzania

due to lack of immediate statistical data, we therefore

decided to compile data from MOOC providers based

on geographical locations of enrolled learners as pub-

lished by Coursera - the most popular MOOC. Learn-

ing analytic shows minimum interests in MOOCs in

many African countries as compared to that of Asia,

Europe and North America. A similar pattern is also

observed in the openHPI dashboard as shown in Figure.

3 (Renz et al., 2017) (Oyo and Kalema, 2014).

These ﬁndings support the argument that e-learning

tools such as MOOC need to utilize social media to

enhance user’s experience in online education. Social

media intervention is critical because with the right

approach every user of social media can participate in

MOOCs at least through mobile technologies.

https://github.com/raadbintareaf/Twitter-Crawler

Figure 3: Distribution of MOOC learners in Coursera plat-

form.

5 DISCUSSION

The ﬁndings immediately point out the technological

development of mobile communications and high im-

provement in internet connections in many African

regions that used to be far behind a decade ago. With

Massive Open Online Courses - MOOC becoming a

preferable e-learning tool, there are vivid potentials

for high education in Africa. Nevertheless, we have

observed only a few footprints of e-learning, in par-

ticular tiny usage of MOOCs in the region. One of

the drawbacks detected in many MOOCs platforms is

their low support for mobile devices as compared to

computers. We put forward our notion that expected

success of online learning in Africa is subjective to

use of mobile devices, i.e mobile learning is currently

a more convincing approach rather than web-based

applications.

The increasing pace of mobile devices and wireless

communications create a conducive digital environ-

ment enough to boost mobile learning which brings

academic instructions and learning materials much

closer to the learners through mobile devices rather

than computers and other digital media. It is also much

easier to share the educational content with other learn-

ers in social media. Mobile learning is also expected

to emphasizes the on-time convenience of the learner,

i.e., provides additional ﬂexibility and perhaps higher

frequency in accessing learning materials.

Social media are credited for their ability to dis-

seminate their content at a much higher speed and in

an efﬁcient way compared to other websites among

internet users. The social media usually provide shar-

ing functions at hand that enables users to forward

interesting content to their friends or public in gen-

eral. In this context, the applications, therefore, may

help as well to distribute MOOCs materials. Educators

and researchers are continually experimenting with

social media technologies hoping to stimulate critical

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394

thinking skills, collaboration, and knowledge construc-

tion through social computing (Griesemer, 2012),(Al-

Zoube and El-Seoud, 2009).

Due to a large number of students involved in so-

cial media, we see chances for improving recognition

of MOOCs by integration with social networking sites.

This approach is intended to increase the awareness of

MOOCs among students, however, may fail to engage

them directly within MOOC platforms. A different ap-

proach in social computing refers to means of posting

excerpts of MOOCs directly into social media aiming

to simulate learning with social media and perhaps

draw the attention of students toward MOOC.

The rate of searching, downloading and sharing

MOOCs mobile apps is also small in contrast to that

of social media apps installed in smartphones of stu-

dents. While using social media apps, students fre-

quently seem to browse and engage themselves with

pre-presented content to their mobile screens - most

of the content we see in our proﬁles in social media

are based on our browsing experiences and might be

difference from one user to another. This process usu-

ally delivers custom-made and personalized content to

the user which exposes the user to a vast pool of infor-

mation that was never requested at ﬁrst place. Further

involvement in a speciﬁc topic is possible once the

user responds by pressing a button or clicking a link to

the next page. By infusing learning materials in social

media, MOOCs become a part of social media content

and thus might grab the attention of students who take

further actions in MOOC platforms.

The ﬁndings suggest that students are eager to par-

ticipate in online education on their mobile devices,

even though are currently inclined to social media.

However, the experiments based on the infusion or

introduction of MOOC learning materials directly into

social media brought signiﬁcant interests in coinciden-

tal learning. Coincidental learning is a type of learning

that occurs in settings without prior arrangements or

plans by the system user. For example, a social media

user might start learning merely of the interest of the

information presented at ﬁrst sight.

The awareness and penetration of MOOC into so-

cial media in Africa might solve the persistent chal-

lenges facing education systems such as limited edu-

cational resources and high costs. The scarce of edu-

cational resources yields a large number of excluded

students from universities and institutes. Figure. 4

shows an expectation of MOOCs in accommodating

excluded students who missed out the opportunity to

pursue higher education either in the state-sponsored

or private sector

Social computing illustrates the concern with the

intersection of social behavior and computational sys-

Figure 4: Expectation of MOOCs by mobile learning.

tems. Social computing is based on creating or sharing

social contexts not limited alone to the use of smart-

phones and educational technologies in particular. Rel-

evant interest in the realm of social computing lies in

the involvement of social media and mobile devices

in the context of education delivery in Africa. So-

cial computing is our foremost approach to combine

e-learning together with smartphones to yield mobile

learning.

As the last point, we urge the use of existing in-

ternet technologies as well as the present digital at-

mosphere to improve access to web-based e-learning

in Africa, merely because the current pace of mobile

devices can make improvements in education as it has

already achieved success in online social networking.

6 CONCLUSION

This paper explores the increasing pace of social net-

working among internet users with mobile technolo-

gies. Smartphones and tablet computers prove to be

the most popular modern digital devices in Africa.

Currently, mobile devices ﬁnd use in executing daily

online activities such as access to social media rather

than conventional computers. Our research reveals that

little information about MOOCs is known to internet

users in Africa apparently due to low awareness, in par-

ticular when compared to social media. The internet

usage in the region is only overwhelmed with social

networking activities, mostly being in non-educational

context.

Online learning and closely related MOOC vocab-

ularies are rarely mentioned or discussed in social

media in comparison to politics, entertainments, and

other forms of non-educational topics. We, however

observed that users of social media tend to be open

and fair enough to respond to information presented

to them, once perceived as useful in their own inter-

ests. Many students frequently bring and share non-

educational content, however some bring topics related

Smart MOOC

395

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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