The Potential of Interdisciplinarity in MOOC Research: How do education and computer science intersect?

Given that both computer scientists and educational researchers publish on the topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the research community should analyze how these disciplines approach the same topic. In order to promote productive dialogue within the community, we report on a bibliometrics study of the growing MOOC literature and examine the potential interdisciplinarity of this research space. Drawing from 3,380 bibliographic items retrieved from Scopus, we conducted descriptive analyses on publication years, publication sources, disciplinary categories of publication sources, frequent keywords, leading authors, and cited references. We applied bibliographic coupling and network analysis to further investigate clusters of research topics in the MOOC literature. We found balanced representation of education and computer science within most topic clusters. However, integration could be further improved on, for example, by enhancing communication between the disciplines and broadening the scope of methods in specific studies.