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The potential of interdisciplinary in MOOC research: how do education and computer science intersect?

Published: 26 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Given that both computer scientists and educational researchers publish on the topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the research community should analyze how these disciplines approach the same topic. In order to promote productive dialogue within the community, we report on a bib-liometrics study of the growing MOOC literature and examine the potential interdisciplinarity of this research space. Drawing from 3,380 bibliographic items retrieved from Scopus, we conducted descriptive analyses on publication years, publication sources, disciplinary categories of publication sources, frequent keywords, leading authors, and cited references. We applied bibliographic coupling and network analysis to further investigate clusters of research topics in the MOOC literature. We found balanced representation of education and computer science within most topic clusters. However, integration could be further improved on, for example, by enhancing communication between the disciplines and broadening the scope of methods in specific studies.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
L@S '18: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale
June 2018
391 pages
ISBN:9781450358866
DOI:10.1145/3231644
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 26 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. MOOC
  2. bibliometrics
  3. interdisciplinary research
  4. online learning

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L@S '18
L@S '18: Fifth (2018) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
June 26 - 28, 2018
London, United Kingdom

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L@S '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 58 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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