A new study has found that Facebook may help students to get enrolled and engaged to massive online courses or MOOCs.
In the study researchers have found out that students tend to interact more on the social media site than through the course tools and they have found this by comparing MOOC student course’s Facebook groups to built-in course message boards and forums.
According to a Doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University in US said that in previous studies researchers have found out that the real challenge of MOOC developers is trying to keep students engaged in the course.
Currently MOOC platforms are not offering features for students to work together and a good communication channel between the students and teachers.
But social media platform Facebook can be of great help as its interface has several features, which are yet to match MOOC courses.
A Facebook user using the app
According to researchers in Facebook groups the users tend to sign up with their real names while as students can create fake personas on the course body.
Moreover real names give students the idea that they are talking to real people, which also help to build in the environment of coordination and trust.
This is also helpful as students will start interacting before weeks of starting the course, which will further help in building the rapport.
Facebook posts and replies are much more organized than message boards which are easily buried among another post.
Researchers took the data from Facebook groups and three courses on Coursera, a platform that hosts MOOCS.
The data collected from Facebook gives the various information about activities such as replies, likes and comments for students on both the sites.
Less than 10% of Coursera posted content will on the other side on an average 28% Facebook users were active in the three courses groups.
