This research examines the media literacy practices that news consumers use to inform their gatekeeping decisions. Using a constant comparative coding method, the author conducted a qualitative analysis of hundreds of discussion board posts from adult participants in a digital media literacy Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to identify major themes and examine growth in participants’ sense of responsibility related to sharing news information, their feeling of empowerment to make informed decisions about the media messages they receive, and how the media literacy tools and techniques garnered from the MOOC have affected their daily media interactions. Findings emphasize the personal and contextual nature of media literacy, and that those factors must be addressed to ensure the success of a media literacy education program.
The pandemic that hit in 2020 has boosted the growth of online learning that involves the booming of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). To support this situation, it will be helpful to have tools that can help students in choosing between the different courses and can help instructors to understand what the students need. One of those tools is an online course ratings predictor. Using the predictor, online course instructors can learn the qualities that majority course takers deem as important, and thus they can adjust their lesson plans to fit those qualities. Meanwhile, students will be able to use it to help them in choosing the course to take by comparing the ratings. This research aims to find the best way to predict the rating of online courses using machine learning (ML). To create the ML model, different combinations of the length of the course, the number of materials it contains, the price of the course, the number of students taking the course, the course’s difficulty level, the usage of jargons or technical terms in the course description, the course’s instructors’ rating, the number of reviews the instructors got, and the number of classes the instructors have created on the same platform are used as the inputs. Meanwhile, the output of the model would be the average rating of a course. Data from 350 courses are used for this model, where 280 of them are used for training, 35 for testing, and the last 35 for validation. After trying out different machine learning models, wide neural networks model constantly gives the best training results while the medium tree model gives the best testing results. However, further research needs to be conducted as none of the results are not accurate, with 0.51 R-squared test result for the tree model.
