Exploring Class Discussions from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Cartography

The rise of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has led to its application in Cartographic education. Students in these classes generate enormous amounts of text data in the form of discussion forum posts. Here we explore the topics and geographic references found in over 95,000 forum posts collected during the 2013 launch of Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, a MOOC taught on Coursera. Using Phrase Nets, topic modeling methods, and a named-entity extraction geocoding tool, we show how students describe their use of maps, what key topics drove conversations during the class, and the geography associated with placenames mentioned in posts. These results help shed light on how novices use and understand Cartography and show how places found in discussion forum text reflect the global reach of MOOCs.