Research Ethics of Twitter for MOOCs

Eamon Costello,Enda Donlon,Mark Brown

doi:10.24059/olj.v23i3.1564

Abstract

This study examined the ethical considerations researchers have made when investigating MOOC learners’ and teachers’ Twitter activity. In so doing, it sought to addresses the lack of an evidence-based understanding of the ethical implications of research into Twitter as a site of teaching and learning. Through an analysis of 31 studies we present a mapping of the ethical practices of researchers in this area. We identified potential ethical issues and concerns that have arisen. Our main contribution is to seek to challenge researchers to engage critically with ethical issues and hence develop their own understanding of ethically- appropriate approaches. To this end, we also reflected and reported on our own evolving practice.

Highlights

This study examined the ethical considerations researchers have made when investigating MOOC learners’ and teachers’ Twitter activity
Research has been conducted using Twitter on a wide diversity of topics, such as MOOC learner experience (Kop, 2011), the acquisition of social capital (Joksimović, Dowell, et al, 2015) and comparisons between what happens within a MOOC and what learners say on social media (Joksimović, Zouaq, et al, 2015)
We aimed to do this by asking what ethical considerations other researchers have made when investigating MOOC learners’ and teachers’ Twitter activity

Summary

Introduction

This study examined the ethical considerations researchers have made when investigating MOOC learners’ and teachers’ Twitter activity. In so doing, it sought to addresses the lack of an evidencebased understanding of the ethical implications of research into Twitter as a site of teaching and learning. There may be a great many insights we could unlock from mining digital data, but there are consequences that this activity could have that may be unforeseen, unintended, or at worst wilfully ignored This became apparent to members of our research team during a research study of the hashtag #MOOC on Twitter (Costello et al, 2016; Costello et al, 2017). In our study we sought to analyze the discourse of MOOCs on Twitter by conceptualized Twitter users as actors in a form of networked public

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