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Micro-ethnography of a MOOC - Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

By Dora H

  • The BBC article

    The BBC article
    I was reading an article on BBC about how one mother's tweet became viral and made his soon and the #HimToo movement go viral.

  • The lightbulb moment

    The lightbulb moment
    Wondering if there is a MOOC on viral marketing and googling it

  • Enrolling

    Enrolling
    Quick decision to enrol to MOOC - Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content provided by Pennsylvania University on Coursera

  • First week of MOOC

    First week of MOOC
    During 4 of the course I have gone through the first week of MOOC. The highlight was familiarising myself with the content, watching videos and undertaking some further research on some of the terms mentioned by Prof. Berger, the course presenter.

  • 2nd and 3rd week of MOOC

    2nd and 3rd week of MOOC
    During week 5 of the course I've spent more time studying for MOOC. This proved to be very not just for my MSc, but also for my day-to-day job. Some of the ex used proved to be relevant & enriched my knowledge of social persuasion and human behaviour. During this time I have also discovered one element that I did not enjoy, the all American examples and case studies used in the course. This did not address the international audience, unfortunately and some dissatisfaction was visible in comments

  • Tutorial - and week 4 of MOOC

    Tutorial - and week 4 of MOOC
    Before the start of week 6 my group and I had a tutorial that was very useful. Some of the topics discussed included participation and lack of in discussion forums. I was also encouraged to look at Coursera's policy for those intending to do research/microetnography while undertaking MOOCs. I found that Coursera has an open policy that allows data from MOOCs on the platform to be used for research as long as it is anonymised .

  • Honesty and transparency

    Honesty and transparency
    After the tutorial I have added information on my profile to be transparent about the fact that I will undertake ethnography/microethnography study while enrolled on MOOC. The MOOC structure of the forum encouraged informal conversation, but no essential or revolutionary resources, articles, opinions were exchanged in the 3 years the MOOC was run.

  • Micro-ethnography 1

    The course looked at the building blogs of making viral content. It was structured over 4 weeks and each week had a quiz to complete if the participant paid for the MOOC. If the participant did not pay to undertake the course, they could not take the quiz. The discussion forum was available to everyone, although close to no conversations took place. The very high majority of conversations on the forum focused on technical issues.

  • Micro-ethnography 2

    Each week had a series of videos to watch. These had subtitles, making them more accessible. Although the course was synchronous, I have seen no evidence of the tutors engaging or encouraging conversation of the forum except for when technical questions were asked. This resulted in a lack of community and belonging for the course. I have searched to see whether more conversations were happening on Twitter, but this was not the case.

  • Micro-ethnography 3

    Finally, the MOOC provides qualitative content and based on the comments made in the final week of the course in the discussion forum, participants find it useful and are grateful for undertaking it. The discussion forum of week 4 can be associated with gratitude wall where everyone posts their thank you's but none is keen to keep in touch. No matter how good the content of the course is, it did not manage to become viral and a lack of community and feeling of belonging was observed.