A Study of Influences of Social Network Awareness on MOOC Learner Behaviors: Case of Chulalongkorn University Free MOOC

In 2017, Chulalongkorn University has started an online learning platform providing many interesting courses by Chulalongkorn University lecturers that allows anyone to learn for free (Chula MOOC). However, each course is opened for certain period of time. If any courses are popular, they will be re-opened for the next batch. For each batch, a Facebook group is created to connect between learners and the instructor. However, we noticed that even in some popular courses, there are some learners who completed the course and some who did not complete the course. From this problem, we think that the data from each course Facebook group might give us some useful information related to the motivation behavior to finish the course. Therefore, in this work, we analyzed data from Facebook graph API from a popular course in three batches using statistics. Data consists of the amount of activities, instructor activities, learners’ activities and instructor and learners’ interaction activities. We also used some information from Chula MOOC platform. The result shows that the Facebook group is an area where students participate in the interaction, which has helped to motivate other learners in the group or who may not be interested to continue their learning or complete their learning. We also introduce that the chatbot could help to motivate the students to complete their course. For example, sending the messages to encourage others or asking students in the time that seem to be more dropout. Currently, we are developing the chatbot for checking the hypothesis further.