DigiMethods Africa MOOC

[DigiMethodsAfricaMOOC]

Project Lead:

• Alette Schoon @AletteS
• Henri-Count Evans @henricountevans

Mentor:

• Sara El Gebali @selgebali

Project Vision:
We’re working with Media Studies Researchers and Computer Scientists to write a handbook and make a series of short training videos or MOOC so that African academics can use computational methods for researching the media.

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Week 7

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Week 13

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Week 14

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Week 15

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[DigiMethodsAfricaMOOC]

We’re working with Media Studies Researchers and Computer Scientists to write a handbook and make a series of short training videos or MOOC so that African academics can use computational methods for researching the media.

[marlouramaekers]

Like I said yesterday in the cohort call, really cool project! Out of curiosity, what type of methods do you plan to include in the handbook/training videos?

[ToriGijzen]

It's great to hear you want to make computational methods accessible to everyone! Do you have any collaboration with experienced people/companies to set up MOOCs?

[AletteS]

Like I said yesterday in the cohort call, really cool project! Out of curiosity, what type of methods do you plan to include in the handbook/training videos?

Hi @marlouramaekers - so nice to hear you think it is a cool project. We are currently looking at using both R and Python to scrape African newspapers and social media sites and to do some automated analysis such as generating word clouds, doing sentiment analysis and topic modelling. We also want to show people how to use existing tools like 4CAT, developed by Amsterdam University's DMI project. We are however a bit nervous about teaching social media scraping...any advice on this would be welcome.

[AletteS]

It's great to hear you want to make computational methods accessible to everyone! Do you have any collaboration with experienced people/companies to set up MOOCs?

Hi @ToriGijzen thanks for the question. We don't have any collaboration with experienced people or companies to set up a MOOC, however I am an experienced educational filmmaker who loves MOOCs, so hopefully that is a good start. Do you have any suggestions for who we should collaborate with?

[Web-learning]

I’m interested to hear that you have chosen to use the MOOC format. Be curious to hear what kind of MO0C you imagine (cMOOC or xMOOC). Also was wondering if you had heard of a SPLOT? Check out splot.ca

[AletteS]

I’m interested to hear that you have chosen to use the MOOC format. Be curious to hear what kind of MO0C you imagine (cMOOC or xMOOC). Also was wondering if you had heard of a SPLOT? Check out splot.ca

Hi Derek @Web-learning - Maybe you could enlighten us to what these different options are. We don't really know about the different kinds of MOOCs, I just assumed a MOOC was a collection of short videos to share a set of skills. I thought if we put it on YouTube that would qualify as a MOOC - not sure about the alternatives. As I have worked in educational video for many years and like to learn things with video, we went for that. Splat looks interesting, but I like the immersive aspect of video. What is it you like about Splat?

[Web-learning]

Hello @AletteS. So MOOC’s have a history. That began round about 2008, when George Siemens and Stephen Downs conceptualized a connectivist ( hence the C) Massive Open Online Course, that aggregated (rather than pre-selected), content that was presented by those who were enrolled. The material was open and licensed openly. The work was collaborative, built upon dialogue and encouraged knowledge development. In around 2012, this switched. And MOOC’s became more aligned with traditional university teaching, with graded materials, subscriptions and certificates. If the series of videos, we’re created by a range of different participants, each offering their own perspective, and playing this knowledge forward with annotations and discussions, then you might have the makings of a cMOOC. I would think that these videos should be embedded in each makers own blogs or social media pages, where they can give context to what they made.

[Web-learning]

Not sure if that helps, or if I’m splitting hairs? I like this poster, because suggests that the MOOC acronym is negotiable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#/media/File:MOOC_poster_mathplourde.png).what I like about splot, is it is people hosting their own webpages or blogs, and these distributed efforts elect to speak to each other. Same thing is possible with video? Needs to be a greater degree of technical skills?