Abstract
Social media have played a significant role in modern life through popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat. In a MOOC, “Making Sense of News,” global learners participating in the course discussed local journalism practices in different countries. Over 900 messages were posted in the course during a period of 6 weeks. This paper explores how these participants discussed not only traditional journalism but also how verified and non-verified news were disseminated through social media in the course forum. NVivo 11 has been used to do theme coding and analysis. Among over 950 postings in the forum, “social media” emerged naturally in the forum discussion as one of the high-frequency phrases, even though the focus of the course was on practices in national and local corporate news agencies. There were 398 postings made by participants from the top five countries (Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, and the United States) in examining the various ways that news is disseminated. Findings show factors affecting news dissemination through social media, including individuals having greater interest as citizen journalists, making an impact, and responding to government control among the majority of global learners.
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Acknowledgment
Data collected on Making Sense of News, the massive open online course, was taught by Dr. Masato Kajimoto, Assistant Professor of Practice, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong (HKU). This is to show my sincere appreciation of his proactive approach of embedding MOOC in his teaching and a team of dedicated teaching assistants in making the course a success.
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Hodgson, P. (2018). Global Learners’ Behavior on News in Social Media Platforms Through a MOOC. In: Deng, L., Ma, W., Fong, C. (eds) New Media for Educational Change. Educational Communications and Technology Yearbook. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8896-4_12
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