Exploring Social Media Data for MOOC Recommendation

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are a key tool for open education stakeholders and high-level universities to face the problem of limited resources and make education accessible worldwide. Our study relies on the hypothesis of the influence of learning adaptation on the learners' lack of motivation in MOOCs. In this sense, a recommendation approach could stimulate the learner's interest in specific MOOCs. In previous research, we have identified the recommendation criteria to recommend MOOCs adapted to the learner's needs and motivations. Then, we modeled the ontology of the learning actors' profiles for the matching of the characteristics of learners with adapted MOOCs. Afterward, we designed the functional architecture and use cases of a semantic recommendation system to stimulate learners' interest in MOOCs. However, the recommendation process is still hindered by the learner profile on these platforms that doesn't represent the learner's interests and motivations. Yet, social media profiles extraction can be an external data source for learners' profile enrichment. So, the purpose of this research is to use social media mining for the acquisition of personal and professional data about learners. Therefore, we apply the first phases of data mining on a social media dataset to explore the potentially meaningful data for MOOC recommendation.