The Co-Authorship and Subject Areas Network in MOOCS’ Scientific Production in Web of Science

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is a new phenomenon in online learning which are held by higher education institutions and universities. MOOCs is larger than normal classes and it is free as well. The present study aims to specify the authors’ structure of co-authorship and the required indicators in analyzing co-authorship, co-authorship network of countries, organizations and subject areas in MOOCs. All productions regarding scientific areas of MOOCs were extracted from the Web of Science from the beginning till 2016. There are 2195 extracted documents that were saved as txt and isi formats. Co-authorship drawing networks were prepared by website software CiteSpace version 5.1.R8 SE and Gephi version 0.9.2. MOOCs co-authorship network is regarded as spare that means the number of ties is less than nodes. This indicates that authors in this area have fewer tendencies for scientific relations. European countries play the main role in this area and their co-authorship is considerable. Harvard University has considerable co-authorship in this domain. According to the results of this study, MOOCs’ network suffers from the lack of collaboration.