Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 19

3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHOD

3.1 CONTEXT
This research is framed around assumptions. The MOOC arena is very new and
has developed rapidly over the last two years (2011-2012), which is why the
epistemology for this research is Constructivism (Crotty, 1998), based on an
Interpretivist approach (Klein & Myers, 1999), using phenomenological research.
Interpretivism is highly relevant here, given the resources available for analysis.

3.2 DESIGN PROCESS
MOOC scoping data collection
In order to establish issues around this rapidly changing area of MOOC phenomena,
social media was used to curate content. Using Scoop.it, I gathered resources,
placing them into the topic area ‘MOOCs’ (http://www.scoop.it/t/mooc-s). Each
resource was annotated using the ‘insight’ feature and then tags were applied. The
tags were refined to identify themes for the research.
There are 581 resources (to date, constantly updated and reviewed) categorized
using 23 tags – Appendix 1. The resources were gathered through a number of
mechanisms. Initially, the Scoop.it was created to save information in a visual way
that could easily be recalled. The MOOCs Scoop.it is one of five other areas of
interest. As MOOCs were my main area of interest then I focused my attention on
gathering as much information as possible. At the time of initiating the study,
(September 2012) there were very few articles available and almost no published
research on the xMOOCs. Research was confined to previously published papers
on Connectivist MOOCs (Kop, Siemens, Downes, deWaard,etc). The main source
of information about MOOCs came from an excellent paper ‘Making Sense of
MOOCs’ (Daniel, 2012). There were a limited number of news articles and likewise
blogs. However, by the end of the year, 2012, much more commentary, blog posts
and news articles were produced. By using social media (Twitter, Google alerts,
Yahoo alerts) and Scoop.it’s curation tools I was able to bring together the content
and filter information.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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