A Roadmap for Incorporating Online Social Media in Educational Research

Abstract

Thanks to advancements in communication and online social media, there has been a surge of useful online educational resources across the Internet. In addition to supplementing educational materials, these resources could be used in varying education research and potentially advance the quality of education. Nevertheless, conducting such research projects requires using big data techniques and approaches to find meaningful resources and harnessing them in an effective way. In this chapter, we present a roadmap for how to incorporate online social media in education research projects. The roadmap consists of three major components: project initialization, data collection, and data utilization. Furthermore, we present some learned lessons, tips, and tricks, as well as case studies from the Teachers in Social Media project ( www.teachersinsocialmedia.com /). We believe this chapter can be used as a practical reference point for many researchers whose concern is connecting data to their education research endeavors.