1. Su-Tuan Lulee
September 1st, 2013
Assessing Critical Thinking in Massive
Open Online Courses(MOOCs):
The Relationship Between Content Analysis &
Social Network Analysis

2. • MOOC is an emerging form of education and has
been placed in wide context of open education
recently. However, the nature of emergent,
fragmented, diffuse, and diverse nature of
MOOCs make educators question about “To what
extent students of MOOCs have demonstrated
critical thinking skills?”
• How can content analysis and social network help
with answering the question? Do the results of
these two methods highly related to each other?
Problem

3. • Setting: Adult open online learning
Context

4. • To investigate whether or not the analysis
results from two research methods – content
analysis and social analysis highly related to
each other.
Purpose

5. • Critical thinking is important for knowledge
construction in education.
• The interaction in group discussions is the visual
evidence of critical thinking. More interaction
leads to higher levels of knowledge construction.
• Content analysis and social network analysis are
both effective tools for investigating student
critical thinking. Levels of critical thinking in
MOOCs should highly relate to the centrality
measures of social networks.
Assumption

6. • Research tools: content analysis (Atlas.ti),
social network analysis (NodeX/SNAPP), and
Spearman’s correlations.
• Samples:
– participants > 300 per MOOC
– main discussions took place in an LMS (Canvas)
• Procedure: collect discussion data → Excel →
Content analysis/SNA → Correlation analysis
Methodology

7. • To what extent students of MOOCs have
demonstrated critical thinking skills?
• How can content analysis and social network
help with answering the question?
• Do the results of these two methods highly
related to each other?
Research Questions

8. • MOOC have been adopted widely in higher
education however academic research on MOOCs
is limited currently.
• Due to the massive learners of MOOCs, the
educators will rely heavily on learning analysis
technique to support their decisions on next-step
instructional intervention, and the curriculum
design in the near future. It is necessary to
validate the various existing measurements.
Significance of the Study

9. • Generalizability:
– Focus on discussions on LMS only
– convenience sampling
– small sample size (only 2-3 MOOCs will be
analyzed)
Limitation