We are delighted to share our latest paper produced as part of a five-year SSHRC-funded initiative on Learning Analytics for the Social Media Age (#pLASMA). The paper is entitled “Linking online identities and content in connectivist MOOCs across multiple social media platforms”  and is being presented at the 2016 World Wide Web conference.

In this paper, we examine how multiple social media platforms are being used for formal and informal learning by examining data from two connectivist MOOCs (or cMOOCs). Our overarching goal is to develop and evaluate methods for learning analytics to detect and study collaborative learning processes. For this paper, we focus on how to link multiple online identities of learners and their contributions across several social media platforms in order to study their learning behaviours in open online environments. Many challenges were found in collection, processing, and analyzing the data; results are presented here to provide others with insight into such issues for examining data across multiple open media platforms.