Political ideology shows essentially no relationship with total forum activity in politically-themed MOOCs¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2 · i0 negligible
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i0 The rank-order correlation between ideology and total forum activity was near zero and consistent across replies, comments, and upvotes. → Yeomans 2018

Evidence¶

Yeomans 2018¶

Yeomans, M., Stewart, B. M., Mavon, K., Kindel, A., Tingley, D., & Reich, J. (2018). The Civic Mission of MOOCs: Engagement across Political Differences in Online Forums. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 28, 553–589. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-017-0161-0

q2 · i0 · associational · r2

Correlational analysis of forum activity among U.S. students who reported ideology (39% of posters, 42% of focal-thread activity). Effect sizes negligible: "rank order correlation: rτ = −.019" overall, with sub-correlations of −.024, −.015, and .007 for replies, comments, and upvotes respectively; all effectively zero.

"This analysis found essentially no relationship between political ideology and total forum activity (rank order correlation: rτ = −.019), and this result was consistent when we looked separately at replies (rτ = −.024), comments (rτ = −.015), and upvotes (rτ = .007)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Upvote assortativity by ideology appeared in American Government but not Saving Schools, with sorting stronger among conservatives — related
• Forum comments show little evidence of ideology-based sorting, indicating engagement across political difference — related
• Structural topic models show partisan differences in topic use amount to less than 2% of all MOOC forum posts — related
• Partisan language is only weakly predictive of ideology in MOOC forum posts, suggesting linguistic convergence — related
• Course-created forum threads in these MOOCs showed balanced ideological contribution, with only small conservative-leaning exceptions — related
• Politically-themed MOOCs attract U.S. students representing a diverse range of political beliefs across the ideological spectrum — related