Feature-Based Analysis of Social Networking and Collaboration in MOOC

The aim of this article is to get insight into the features of social networking and collaboration in a massive open online course (MOOC) platform. We performed a feature-based analysis of twelve popular MOOC platforms – seven proprietary and five open-source platforms. Our study reveals that there are: (1) Two ways to include social networking – in-course and external; and (2) Two ways to incorporate collaboration functionality – built-in tools and third-party tools. The functionality provided by third-party tools differs; so, the selection of the tool is a challenge. For a built-in tool of MOOC, there is a need to re-identify the features for including it in any other MOOC platform; (3) Different ways to integrate the same tool in platforms; and (4) Different features of the same tool supported by various platforms. The proposed feature list helps future MOOC providers and developers to include social networking and collaboration functionality by selection, in contrast to specifying them afresh; and prospective educators can compare and select platforms, accordingly.