Cartography of Controversies about MOOCs

Citation (Accepted Article): Khalid, Md. Saifuddin, and Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen. “Cartography of Controversies about

MOOCs.” In Proceedings of Global Learn 2015, 2015:25–35. FernUniversität in Hagen, Regionalzentrum Berlin: April 16-

17, 2015: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 2015. http://www.editlib.org/pv/150845/.

Cartography of Controversies about MOOCs

Md. Saifuddin Khalid, Department of Learning & Philosophy, [email protected]

Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen, Department of Learning & Philosophy, [email protected]

Aalborg University, Denmark

Abstract: Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are one of most recent educational

technology development that have become a highly debated issue, polarized among

proponents, boosters, skeptics, and resistants. To understand the nature of such evolving

technology concepts, the typical methods and techniques in current literature result in the

production of systematic literature reviews, case studies, and theoretical or conceptual

frameworks. This work-in-progress paper explores the controversies about MOOCs by

adopting the recently developed method “cartography of controversies” from the science and

technology studies (STS) discipline. The method guides the application of actor network

theory (ANT). Online digital media and tools (namely, Scopus, ScienceScape, Google trends,

OpenHeatMap, NodeXL, Gephi, Facebook, Twitter) are used for data collection and analysis.

The study uses both qualitative and quantitative tools and techniques to highlight the

statements, literatures, actors, cosmoses or general concepts involved in the controversy. The

paper propounds the adoption of the method in the field of education and educational

technology and proposes through demonstration in this article that such investigations can be

reported as a genre of the scholarly article.

Introduction

Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are one of most recent educational technology development.

MOOCs have become a highly debated issue, polarized among proponents, boosters, sceptics and resistants

(Lawton & Lunt, 2013; Nguyen, Davis, Sharrock, & Hempsall, 2014). The public debates about MOOCs have

become widespread, involving people from diverse disciplines and with diverse interests. To understand the

nature of such evolving technology concepts, the typical methods and techniques in current literature result in

the production of systematic literature reviews, case studies, and theoretical or conceptual frameworks.

Cartography of controversies, which comprises a collection of techniques to explore and visualize issues with

actor-network theory (ANT), has a high potential to explore the burning matters in the field of education, more

narrowly in the area of educational technology or e-learning. Bruno Latour, a French philosopher, sociologist

and anthropologist of science, has pioneered the methodical approach to exploring and communicating about

controversial issues (Latour, 2011; Latour, Mauguin, & Teil, 1992). As part of his work in the field of science

and technology studies (STS), Latour devised and taught a didactic version of ANT for mapping controversies

(Venturini, 2010). Through his EU project named mapping controversies of science for politics (MACOSPOL),

the idea gained further maturity. “Adopted and developed in several universities in Europe and the US, the

cartography of controversies is today a full research method, though, unfortunately, not a much documented

one” (Venturini, 2010, p. 258). With these scopes, we observe and explore the controversies about MOOCs by

using the method – cartography of controversies. We began with the goal to explore the nature of MOOC

controversy, by applying both qualitative and quantitative techniques. As we, the authors from the field of e-

learning or educational technology came to learn about this method of STS discipline, the following

contributions can be claimed based on the backdrop mentioned above.

The paper adopts the cartography of controversies method in the fields of education and educational

technology.

It documents and demonstrates how controversial issues can be documented by using the method

cartography of controversies and proposes that such investigations can be reported as a genre of the

scholarly article. Primarily, the method has been documented for website production as the medium of

communication but not as a research paper (see, for example, Venturini, 2010).

It includes observations and explorations of the contents in the online digital media and analyzes of the

nature of controversies about MOOCs.

It demonstrates the application of some of the digital tools for the data collection and analyzes.

The paper is organized as follows. We begin by defining the term controversy and then reasoning if and why

MOOC is a controversial issue. Then, based on Bruno Latour’s teaching explained by his student Venturini, we

present method for cartography of controversy that applies the actor-network theory. The section also includes a




proposal to adapt Venturini’s 10-layer framework to present the analysis of a controversy though a website, and

apply the adapted framework as a methodical structure for the research documents intended to disseminate

studies on mapping controversies. We covered some layers of the adapted framework to present part of the

work-in-progress exercise in the mapping of MOOC controversy.

What Comprises a Controversy and are MOOCs Controversial?

Certainly, a controversy is the most complex phenomena and the methods of observing and analyzing

must be adopted on the basis of sufficient understanding of what a controversy contains. The Mapping

Controversies on Science for Politics (MACOSPOL) initiative considers the term controversy as every aspect of

a science and technology concept or product that has not yet stabilized. Simply put, “controversies are

situations where actors disagree (or better, agree on their disagreement)” and “in the widest sense:

controversies begin when actors discover that they cannot ignore each other and controversies end when actors

manage to work out a solid compromise to live together.” (Venturini, 2010, p. 261). So, a controversial issue

can fall between these two extreme levels.

There are five features that are common to social controversies (Venturini, 2010): 1) “Controversies

involve all kind of actors, human groups/beings and non-human actors” (e.g. technical and scientific artefacts,

biological and natural elements and etc.), 2) “controversies display the social in its most dynamic form” (i.e. an

actor can break into a network and a heterogeneous network can coalesce to function as an actor), 3)

“controversies are reduction-resistant” (i.e. context dependent and non-generalizable) and “the difficulty of

controversy is not that actors disagree on answers, but that they cannot even agree on questions”, 4)

“controversies are debated” (i.e. taken-for-granted ideas are questioned and discussed), 5) “controversies are

conflicts”, not necessarily involving fights (i.e. actors with different levels of power struggle to reverse or

conserve social values and opinions.

Venurini (2010) uses the properties of magma as a metaphor to describe the complex – solid and liquid

mix – a nature of the cartographies of social controversies. A controversy is considered good if it is not (1) cold,

(2), past, (3) boundless, or (4) underground, that is, open to public debate. The concepts of MOOCs and its

various applications are evolving and being debated in public – by people from different disciples; the

controversy involves actors that are both human and non-human. Interestingly, without “just exploring”, as

Bruno Latours tells his students, it is not possible to sufficiently prove that this is a good controversy. For the

rational and optimists, it might be sufficient to refer to the works of Lawton and Lunt (2013) and Nguyen et al.

(2014), who drew attention to the hot and recent aspects of the controversies about MOOCs.

This paper explores the controversy on MOOCs through identification of different statements,

literatures, actors, networks, and cosmoses. These relevant terms are defined in the next section.

Actor-Network Theory and the Cartography of Controversies Method

Bruno Latour developed a didactic version of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) by combining a set of

techniques to explore a controversial issue and publish the acquired understanding through visual techniques.

The goals and objectives can be traced back from the paper titled “A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs” (Latour

et al., 1992), which is adapted as follows. [Under the theoretical concepts of ‘actor-network theory’, Latour and

his colleagues] attempts to create a new research tool, to follow the dynamics of science and technology.

‘Socio-Technical Analysis’ develops new quantitative indicators and graphic representations with which to map

the development of a scientific controversy or a technical innovation.”(1992, p. 33)

The outcome of such a socio-technical analysis is cartography of the controversies surrounding an

issue. In his two papers Tommaso Venturini (2010, 2012), one of students of Latour, has elaborated the

cartography of controversies method, underlying assumptions, principles, and the digital tools that can be

applied to observe the contents of the controversial issue. The two following subsections are based on the two

papers. First subsection summarizes Venturini’s (2010, p. 258) elaboration on “how to explore controversies

with actor-network theory”. The second subsection summarizes “how to represent controversies with digital

methods” (Venturini, 2012, p. 796). These include the definitions and concepts required to understand the

cartographies. For convenience, the specific applications of digital tools in this study are presented as part of

the analysis.

How to explore controversies with ANT

Latour’s instructions to his students — “just observe” controversies — includes three consequences or

commandments, which might also be called as underlying principles. These are:




“1) you shall not restrain your observation to any single theory or methodology; 2) you shall observe

from as many viewpoints as possible; 3) you shall listen to actors’ voices more than to your presumptions”

(Venturini, 2010, p. 260). Venturini (2012) appends four recommendations: ”4) you shall adjust your

descriptions and observations recursively; 5) you shall simplify complexity respectfully; 6) you shall attribute to

each actor a visibility proportional to its weight; 7) you shall provide descriptions that are adapted, redundant

and flexible.”(2012, p. 5)

The intention of observation in social cartography is not to present a holistic picture or to inform what

should be observed, but to draw attention to the different layers of the controversy. Venturini explains five

observation lenses, which are summarized as follows.

(1) From statements to literatures. The first objective is to identify competing statements from literatures,

which can be investigated by using bibliometric and scientific tools. In addition, a chaotic nebula of

competing statements is also discovered from news articles, blog posts, and other social media.

(2) From the literature to actors. Statements always belong to large networks, which are comprized of

human beings, technological objects, metaphysical entities and many others. According to actor-

network theory (ANT) and in the study of mapping controversies, these beings and entities are termed

as ”actors”. Practically, if the presence or absence of such entity or being has a role in the literature,

especially as part of the competing statements, then it is an actor.

(3) From actors to networks. Latour argued that connectivity, interconnectivity, and heterogeneity are

insufficient properties for the formation of a network; instead, network should be understood as

worknet, which involves work, movement, flow, and changes. This observation involves identification

of actions for tying or untying relationships among actors, where actors inter-act or shape relations get

shaped by relations. The goal is to represent such reltionships visually among actors by network

diagrams.

(4) From networks to cosmoses. The natural tendency each network, comprizing both human actors or

other, is to come to a state of stability. Even the network of actors that try to destabilize has such a

tendency. These tendencies are referred to as the underlying ideology, which form the cluster of

networks or cosmoses. These cosmoses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, i.e. may have

overlapping networks due to the similarities in the principles of their ideologies. The full extent of the

cartography can be perceived only by roaming across the cosmoses (for example, Venturini, 2012, p.

13).

(5) From cosmoses to cosmopolitics. This layer is the trickiest, least understood, and insufficiently

illustrated. The concept takes the point of departure from the imperfections of human intellect that

gives rise to ideological differences and leading to conversial positions. So, it is about mapping based

on the different aspects of human imperfections that clusters the various cosmoses under different

cosmopolitics. Due to insufficient illustration that could clarify the concept, this leyer is not applied in

this study.

How to Represent Controversies with Digital Methods

Social cartographies, whether with digital methods or not, should present a proportionaly according to

different viewpoints’ representativeness, influence, and interest (Venturini, 2012).

Representativeness: The visual representations of the controversies should depend on how many actors

ascribe to each of the viewpoints. More the actors, more visible the arguments become. However, the

cartographers have to be careful in ensuring minimum visibility of the relatively marginal.

Influence: ”Controversies have centers and peripheries, reliefs and valleys, frontiers and passes. In

such territories, not all positions are equal, and actors fight to build and occupy influential positions: positions

that give them the power to affect the actions of other actors. Actors occupying influential positions deserve

particular attention because, like it or not, they will have better chances to shape controversies.” (Venturini,

2012, p. 3) So, the influential actors carry higher weight, and one of the ways of developing measurement scale

is the number of supporters. For instance, if a person’s opinion tweet is re-twitted by 60 others then the

influence weight is 60.

Interest: “It is disagreeing minorities who bring controversies into existence by refusing to settle with

the mainstream and reopening the black boxes of science and technology. No matter how marginal, disagreeing

viewpoints can be interesting because they offer original perspectives and question what is taken for granted.

[…]Cartographers may legitimately choose to map the proportionality of interest instead of size.”

(Venturini, 2012, p. 3)

Cartographers are given a high degree of freedom to choose from the different rules of proportionality

within these three categories.




The application of digital techniques as part of the cartography of the controversy method involves the

following facts (adapted from Venturi, 2012, p. 8):

(1) A search engine does not search the whole web;

(2) the content on the web does not include all the content on the Internet;

(3) the content on the Internet only a subset of the content in the digital media;

(4) the digital content is a subset of the data in the World.

The digital tools offer conveniences in data collection from various Internet-based data repositories,

manipulate different types of data, and to create graphical representations as maps. The objective is not present a

holistic picture but to meaningfully collect from the big ocean of data, to apply ANT for the analysis, and to

disseminate the cartography of the controversial issue.

From a Framework of Controversy-website to Framework of Research Paper

Through MACOSPOL project and based on the teaching experiences at the Science Po university, a

framework for controversy website comprising 9+1 layers has been devised as a pedagogical tool to facilitate

university students as a deliverable alternative to project report (Venturini, 2012). We propose that this

framework should be adapted to disseminate the cartographies of a controversial issue, and a new genre of

research papers can be embraced. The increasing amount of structured content on the Internet and the potential

of digital tools to collect, organize and analyze are sufficient motivation for such an initiative. The proposition

rests on the desires of communities of scholars. For this paper, based on the 9+1 layers, we discuss a preliminary

framework for the analysis section of such papers and demonstrate the application of part of the framework in

the analysis section of this paper.

1. The glossary of terms and non-controversial elements. Amidst the differences in opinions, there are

some shared elements in the controversies that should be explained. Websites allow presenting

multimedia and simulations but for research papers brief text should be included, and the multimedia

and simulations should be used as references. Although this appears first in the order but this will be

difficult to present until the cartography exercise is not complete.

2. The document repository. All the data collected, reorganized, analyzed, and the outputs generated by

various digital tools should be available for reviewers, public examination, and future access. The large

pool of bibliographic data and hypertext environment should be provided with a direct link, and the

exported data should be accessible for possible future changes in the accessibility. Considering the

limitation of words and pages, all these documents can be provided through a single data repository

along with a document that introduces the different types contend available in the folder.

3. The analysis of scientific literature or Scientometrics. Currently many academic document

databases (e.g. Scopus and Web of knowledge) have built-in scientometrics tools that can show the co-

authorship, keywords used, affiliation institution and country, authors’ disciplines, the impact of

journals and conferences and many other features. The other method is to identify the qualitative

aspects comprised of competing statements, institutional clusters, etc.

4. The review of media and public opinion. Recently developed tools (e.g. Nettviz and NodeXL) allows

extracting data from facebook and twitter, which can be graphically illustrated by the same or different

tool (e.g. Gephi and NodeXL). Furthermore, online news, discussion forums, and trends of search

queries can be identified by using different tools (e.g. Google Trends). The outcomes can be the

identification of 1. actors and networks, and 2. contesting statements, cosmoses, and cosmopolitics; the

first outcome can be auto-generated by digital tools, but the latter requires qualitative human decisions

with semi-automated tools (e.g. URL Harvester, issue crawler, NaviCrawler, etc.) or manual

development of cartographies. Automating the qualitative dimension is a major challenge due to the

lack of artificial intelligent and machine learning capability build into computer systems. For inter-

connected forums and websites with discussion, options can be analyzed by using multiple tools (e.g.

data cleaning by URLHarverster and network creation by NodeXL).

5. The tree of disagreement. In the case of techno-scientific controversies, hierarchical trees (also

known as Porphyrian trees) are used to illustrate controversies with different questions and their yes

or no answers. For cartographers, this is a very difficult task to explore the various questions

qualitatively and find a simplified version of the tree where either yes or no has to be selected. In our

experience, we found it a near-impossible task with an additional set of rules, which govern the

decision system. Furthermore, making such a tree requires the cartographer to support an opinion of the

rules, and that will remove some of the actors from the map. So, we differ with Venturini and suggest

that the disagreement should be presented with both yes and no answers. In such case, we might have

nested questions like an if-then rule.

6. The scale of controversies. All controversies are a collection of sub-controversies. ”Cartographers are

free to choose the granularity of their investigation, but they must be able to situate their object of study




in the scale of disputes where it belongs.” (Venturini, 2012, p. 11) The granularity or scale aspect is not

sufficiently clear from Venturini’s explanation and how the concept of scale should be implemented.

So, for now, we leave this aspect undecided.

7. The diagram of actor-networks. The objective of this mapping is to show actor-actor and actor-issue

relationship, which are associated with the broad issue of controversy or a sub-issue. It our experience,

it is not possible to auto generate such actor-network by using a single application or two. Rather,

based on the nature of the network among issues and actors, the actor-networks has to be drawn.

Furthermore, while websites can contain animated illustrations of actor-networks, it might me

sufficient to present in research papers. Moreover, most of the existing controversy sites made as part

of the research project and academic courses are insufficiently detailed with both mapping and what the

map tells about. In the case of research articles, it is very important to make such meaning. So, it is a

matter of further exploration on existing practice of network diagrams in publications.

8. The chronology of the dispute. Controversies change over time. So, the roles of actors and the

changing nature of controversies should be reported on a time line. While websites can support viewing

such interactive maps, the possibility to present those finding is a research paper will be limited. So, we

suggest those chronologies to be presented with both illustration and reference to the online interactive

map.

9. The table of cosmoses. Cosmoses, as defined earlier in the paper, are ideologies in a controversy. ”The

table of cosmoses should represent all those involved in a controversy showing where cosmoses

diverge and where they may overlap.”(Venturini, 2012, p. 11) While Venturini gets away with just an

example of a table of cosmos in the article without reasoning the hierarchical structure in the table and

approach of interpretation, but in the case of scholarly article we need sufficient justification with rule-

base that will support such hierarchy. So, we assume that the table of cosmoses do not include a scale,

rather a hierarchy, and the objective is to represent the hierarchical structure of the ideologies.

10. Perform public debate. Venturini’s framework’s tenth layer is about performing a public debate as

part of the controversy website. In order to remain unbiased and to present the cartographies in scale,

we excluded this from our proposed framework.

Mapping controversies about MOOCs

In this analysis section of this work-in-progress paper, we present an analysis based on first few layers

of the nine layers of the framework proposed in the previous section.

Layer 1. The glossary of terms and non-controversial elements.

MOOC models are still evolving, but Siemens’ (2013) classifications (xMOOCs, cMOOCs, and quasi-MOOCs)

have received highest citation and the definitions are in agreement with former and recent documents and

articles.

cMOOCs are based on constructivist pedagogical model, ”are distributed, and they emphasize, the

importance of learner autonomy. As a consequence of increased learner control, numerous tools and

technologies are used during the delivery of an open course. Each learner selects the technologies that he or she

prefers to use. Course facilitators provide: an infrastructure for content and administrative details (in the form of

a wiki or a Web page); a schedule for synchronous sessions involving guest speakers or live discussions; a

means of communicating with participants and providing course updates (often handled through email and

blogs); and starting points for learners to form connections with each other (a learning management system such

as Moodle).” (2013, p. 8)

xMOOCs are offered in a traditional university model such as Stanford (Coursera), MIT

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)/Harvard (edX), and Udacity (2013, p. 7). Udacity and Coursera and

for-profit and edX is non-profit initiative. The pedagogical model assumes “teacher as expert” and “learner as

knowledge consumer”.” In order to meet the challenges of large numbers of students, assignments are computer-

graded in xMOOCs. Direct instructor feedback is not common, except in discussion forums where teaching

assistants and the course instructor respond to student questions.” (2013, p. 7)

“quasi-MOOCs provide Web-based tutorials as OER, such as those of the Khan Academy

and MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW). These are technically not courses. They consist of OER intended to

support learning-specific tasks such as an operation in algebra, or they are treated as asynchronous learning

resources that do not offer the social interaction of cMOOCs or the automated grading and tutorial-driven

format of xMOOCs. These resources are loosely linked and are not packaged as a course.” (2013, p. 8)




Layer 2. The document repository.

All the data collected, reorganized, analyzed, and the outputs generated by various digital tools are

available (see here: http://tinyurl.com/nh6qy58) for reviewers, public examination, and future access.

Layer 3. Scientometrics

This scientometric analysis is based on a search for the titles, abstracts, and keywords by using

”MOOC AND massive open online course” as the search term in Scopus, which returned 340 documents.

Figure 1 shows that the issue is predominantly researched by scholars from the disciplines of computer science,

social sciences, and engineering; in addition, there are scholars (actors) from 17 other disciplines. Figure 2

shows conference papers, journal articles, and other types of documents (as actors) are associated with the issue

of MOOC.

Figure 1. MOOC documents in Scopus by subject area

Figure 3. MOOC papers by authors from developed

countries (affiliation institution)

Figure 2. MOOC documents in Scopus by type

Figure 4. MOOC papers by authors from developing

countries (affiliation institution)




Figure 3 and 4 show the documents (i.e. actors) contributed by authors (i.e. actors) from developing

countries and developed countries respectively. Taking the international statistical institute’s (ISI) list of

developing countries, to be considered for the year 20151, only about 16% (62 of 388) documents’ affiliation

records/authors are representing a developing country. So, 84% of the documents contributing to the issue are

from developed countries. The authors are from 14 developing and 31 developed countries.

There are 313 records with institution affiliation, which include 160 unique institutions; Except Google

Inc., Microsoft, and IEEE, rest of institutions universities and research organizations. If we look for the broadest

ideological commonality, then we see that all the educational institutions are associated with education and

development.

Scopus analyzer’s tabulation of documents by source includes 92 unique publications, among which

the top five and their respective document frequencies are as follows: International Review of Research in Open

and Distance Learning (23), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Lecture Notes in Artificial

Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (15), Rusc Universities and Knowledge Society Journal (10),

Distance Education (9), and Professorado (9). Each of these journals contain a sub-network that deal with the

topic.

Figure 5 shows the relationships among the main authors, keywords and sources of the 340 documents

identified from Scopus and analyzed by ScienceScape. The figures show an actor-network, which shows how

different source publications (as actors) are connected to keywords (as issues), which are then connected to

authors (as actors). Some of the keywords (as issues) differ in their connectivity due to minor difference in

spelling or for the use of acronyms, for example, massive open online courses (moocs), massive open online

course (mooc), massive open online course, massive open online courses, mooc, moocs. The figure also shows

that considering the education system levels, the keyword higher education, and lifelong learning shows

connectivity with authors publishing about MOOC.’Secondary education’ has not been an issue in

scientometics, but Google trends show news that deals with MOOCs for secondary education level.

Figure 5. Main authors, keywords and sources (actor-networks) in relation to MOOC documents in Scopus

Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion

In this case of MOOC controversy, Google trends, news, blogs and Twitter hashtag ”MOOC” are

analyzed.

For the application of this layer, we began by exploring search pattern of the keywords ”MOOC” and

”MOOCs”, and related online news by using Google trends as an analytical tool. ”Google Trends analyzes a

1 http://www.isi-web.org/component/content/article/5-root/root/81-developing




percentage of Google web searches to determine how many searches have been done for the terms you've

entered compared to the total number of Google searches done during that time.”2

Figure 6 Interest over time on “MOOC” and “MOOCs”, including news headlines linked to alphabets

Figure 7. Regional interest using the term ”MOOCs”

Figure 8. Regional interest using the term ”MOOC”

Figure 6 shows the trend of the occurrence of search terms ”MOOC” and MOOCs (selected based on

Scientometrics) during January 2011 to January 2015 and the alphabets links to news headlines. In the ”related

search” section of Google Trend analysis3, the terms ”coursera” and ”edx” are categorized as breakout, which

means that the two search terms experienced a growth greater than 5000% during January 2011 to January 2015.

Figure 7 and Figure 8 shows Global Heat Maps, based on the January 2015 on the search frequency from those

countries. These maps are generated by exporting Google Trends data, and importing and mapping the data

using OpenHeatMap4. While Google Trends provides a heatmap with less diversity in color but an option to

show interative map against timeline data. The same is possible using OpenHeatMap. These maps can be

embadded in websites by creating from both sources.

Twitter hashtage search ”MOOC” was conducted using NodeXL (a template program extension to

Microsoft Office Excel) on 27. February 2015, collected 4394 unique users and 7423 connections. Twitter will

not feed NodeXL with tweets older than a week, and the tweets retrieved isn’t always the newest ones, yet they

are never older than a week. NodeXL data are visualized using Gephi (see Figure 9), where unique users are the

nodes, and Mentions, replied-to and Tweet are the edges. The #MOOC-followers are divided into six intervals

(0-1000: Red, 1001-10000: Purple, 10001-50000: Light Blue, 50001-100000: Blue, 100001 -1000000: Green,

1000001 -10000000: Yellow). As the edges are also divided into mentions, replied-to and tweets, so to

differentiate between them, they’ve been colored as well (Mentions as green, replied-to as red, and tweet as

blue). Figure 9 shows a partial overview of the major actors in twitter network, contributing to the controversy

via #MOOC. It is easy to observe that hecparis is the biggest actor in the network being the one with most edges

or connections, involved with the mentions, replied-to, and tweets. Hecparis is not one of the actors with most

followers, only having 27500 followers (https://twitter.com/hecparis); This is significantly low compared to

Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Bill Gates, who have more than 10000000 followers. Interestingly,

ticketforchange, polytechnique, and moocf have less than 10000 followers and universite_num have less than

50.000 followers; yet they are the prominent actors. In addition, edxonline (128000 followers), el_bid (220000

followers) are also prominent actors. However, coursera (239000 followers) is a less prominent, yet still

important actor. Parlonsmooc is probably the only actor with fewer than a thousand followers, who’s prominent.

2 https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4355213?hl=en

3 Google trend data source: http://tinyurl.com/prpudwu

4 http://www.openheatmap.com/view.html?map=BathymetersAlacriousLampyrine




The YouTube twitter account with 49.3 million followers is not a prominent actor at all, in the case of MOOC

controversy. The MOOC controversy in twitter includes 88.29% mentions, 9.65% tweets and 2.07% replies-to.

Figure 9. Partial view of the actor-network mapping of Twitter hashtag #MOOC

Navicrawler, URL harvester, and Gephi are used to collect data and to visualize the network of

websites (as actors) involved in the controversy of MOOCs. The illustrations are not included in the paper but

made available in the document repository (see Layer 2).

Layers 5-9:

A qualitative review of papers is in progress as part of the layers 5, 6, 8 and 9; Analysis and outcome of

these layers build on all the other layers, are work-in-progress, and not included in this analysis.

We now present excerpts from one of the news articles from Google trends graph as part of the

qualitative analysis, to demonstrate how to identify statements, actors, networks and cosmoses. Such qualitative

analyses on academic, public media, and social media content result in the cartographies presented in layers 5 to

9.

B: Melsted’s article on Forbes (2014) states “MOOCs [specifically, EdX and Coursera] are now

reaching beyond higher education to include courses geared toward secondary education students.” EdX

identified that ”more than 150,000 of EdX’s estimated 3 million registered users have been high school

students”, who left mark of their need and thereby an enormous demand exists. MOOCs are claimed to fill gaps

for high school students in relation to the following: preparing for college admission (”60 percent of first-year

college students are not ready for postsecondary studies”), access to locally unavailable courses, lack of AP

(advanced placement) curriculum/coursework, and to develop the curriculum of high school by working with

higher education and MOOC-provider-company partners. Californian St. Margaret’s Episcopal School offer

three EdX courses in psychology, Spanish language and culture. The 2000 enrolled students from 45 different

countries are expected to learn from the cultural differences. These students and teachers get global that was

otherwise not possible. Students of St. Margaret’s are encouraged to sign-up but has not decided about offering

credits for participation.

There are two opinion statements, and associated questions will be included as part of the tree of

disagreement (layer 5): 1. Can MOOCs fill gaps for high schools students in relation to their needs? 2. Should

high schools students gain credits for participation in MOOCs? There are many actors: EdX, Coursera,

secondary education students, and St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. From the analysis of the article, the actor-

argument or appropriately the actor-ideology representation by the table of cosmoses will include: Education

sectors, under which there can be higher education and Secondary education.




Conclusion and Future Work

The paper takes the point of departure from the STS discipline applying the theory of ANT by recently

devised cartography of controversies method to explore the Internet-accessible media. We discuss a 10-layer

framework published by Venturini, one of the students of Latour, as a way to adapt the framework suitable for

academic publication genre, instead of a making a website. Taking the controversy of MOOC as a case, we

collected data from Scopus, Google Trends, Twitter and the Internet of website (using URL Harvester and

Crawler Tools), and presented the cartographies by using Scientometric analysis tools (i.e. Scopus,

ScienceScape and Excel) and network data collection and various visualization tools (NodeXL, Google Trends,

Navicrawler, Gephi, OpenHeatMap). We covered the first four layers of the mapping in sufficient details but

could not include some of the network analysis, and summarized the approach being applied to the rest of the

work-in-progress layers (i.e. layer 5-9).

The Scientometric analysis shows that the majority of the scholars working on MOOCs come from the

fields of social science, computer science, and engineering. Only 16% of the authors working on MOOCs are

from developing countries; among the authors from the developed countries US (35%) and Spain (16%)

contribute the major share. There are 183 conference papers, 130 journal articles, and 11 review papers on the

issue. Some of the keywords that should be taken into consideration by educational researchers are motivation,

peer assessment, assessment and quality. Google Trend shows a 5000% grown of the terms edX and coursera

during the last few years. Although there are other MOOCs but those have not yet received such attention. The

Twitter #MOOC analysis includes 88.29% mentions, 9.65% tweets, and 2.07% replies-to. The most active

MOOC-controversy-contributing actors on Twitter are hecparis, polytehnique, universite_num, ticketforchange,

el_bid, parlonsmooc, lecese, and coursera. Secondary schools have become part of the MOOC life-cycle, and

the related actors can be found only in online news and discussions; however, Scopus data does not include that

as a keyword. These findings and the outcome of our further study on this controversy is expected to facilitate

all interested and the stakeholder to come to understand the MOOC-controversy landscape and make better

decisions.

The authors, as educational technologies, would like to invite the researchers, practitioners, policy

makers and other stakeholders involved in the discipline for considering the cartography of controversies as a

method to conduct a study. Furthermore, while we work on the proposed framework for applying the method in

our field, we invite all interested to provide constructive criticism and further development of the framework.

We believe that ”cartography of controversy” has a possibility to become a new genre of research papers and be

categorized beside ”review” papers.

Acknolwdgement: The authors would like to thank Rune Rasmus Gede Thomasen, Mertz Laurent, Andrei

Mihai Furnica for their kind support with the mapping tools.

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Cartography of Controversies about MOOCs

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