Learning Communities in Social Networks and Their Relationship With the MOOCs

This paper discusses how Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) users learn and participate in cooperative environments that promote learning communities within external hypermedia environments, such as the social networks. In order to develop this paper, researchers analyzed the interaction of users enrolled in a course developed under the iMOOC platform, which is based on concepts like connectivism, collaborative learning, gamification, or adaptivity, among others. Specifically, this paper deals with obtaining information about the conversations that take place in external learning communities within social networks like Google+ and Twitter in parallel with the iMOOC platform itself. Through this information is possible to establish the learning types that experience users (non-formal and informal learning usually) and providing an estimation of how users interact with content tagged in social network, and how they use these tagging facilities to continue or create new conversations that allow them to expand or strengthen their learning process developed in the MOOC. To complete the knowledge extracted from these tags and to understand how users interact with this way of metadata declaration, this paper is complemented by a questionnaire that collected how users utilize and understand of these tags based on the main usages and the age of the users of the MOOC.