Abstract
<p class="3">Although educational practitioners have adopted social media to their online or mobile communities, little attention has been paid to investigate the social media messages related to online or mobile learning. The purpose of this research is to identify social media influencers and trends by mining Twitter posts related to online learning and mobile learning. We identified the influencers on Twitter by three different measures: the number of tweets posted by each user, the number of mentions by other users for each user, and the number of retweets for each user. We also analyzed the trends of online learning and mobile learning by the following perspectives: the descriptive statistics of the related tweets, the monthly and hourly line charts of the related tweets, the descriptive statistics of the related retweets, the volume trends of the most retweeted tweets, and the top 10 hashtags of the related tweets. The results of this study can provide educational practitioners different ways of understanding and explaining the public opinions toward online learning and mobile learning.</p>
Highlights
With the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, online learning is becoming an increasingly important mode of education, which allows students to participate regardless of geographic location, independent of time and place (Harasim, 1995)
This research provides a different perspective from the analysis of social media trends and influencers on the topics of online learning and mobile learning
From the analysis results of social media trends, we observed that the discussion about online learning was more popular than mobile learning on Twitter
Summary
With the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, online learning is becoming an increasingly important mode of education, which allows students to participate regardless of geographic location, independent of time and place (Harasim, 1995). There are numerous names for online learning activities such as e-learning, web-based learning/training, Internet-based training, distributed learning, digital collaboration, and distance learning (Khan, 2005). Mobile learning provides an alternative way to learn online with advantages of better access, smaller device, flexibility, and ubiquity (Lam, Yau, & Cheung, 2010). It connects people in information-driven societies effectively, and provides the opportunity for a spontaneous, personal, informal, and situated learning (Shih, 2007)
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