Draft – originally published in: van Treeck, T., Ebner, M. (2013) How Useful Is Twitter for Learning in Massive Communities? An Analysis of Two MOOCs. In: Twitter & Society, Weller, K., Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Mahrt, M., Puschmann, C. (eds.), Peter Lang, p. 411-424 How Useful is Twitter for Learning in Massive Communities? An Analysis of two MOOCs Timo van Treeck & Martin Ebner Introduction The use of Web technology in education has constantly increased over the last few years. After the initial introduction of so-called learning management systems (Helic, Maurer, & Scerbakov, 2004), a considerable shift to more interactive technologies gradually occurred. Web 2.0, coined for the first time by O’Reilly (2010), services such as weblogs, wikis, and podcasts have become more and more in common in today’s lectures in higher education (Augar, Raitman, Zhou, 2004; Evans, 2007; Luca & McLoughlin, 2005). In the last three years, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have attracted millions of users, including many students (Ebner, Nagler, & Schön, 2011). As a consequence of the world becoming more and more connected, the idea of opening online courses to anyone who is interested in them (referred to as Massive Open Online Courses), had emerged. According to McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, and Cormier (2010), a MOOC “integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources” (p. 4). More importantly, in this context, MOOCs are usually spread across the world through existing social networks, mostly Facebook and Twitter. Consequently, these platforms are not only used before, but also during and after a lecture session. Afterwards, educational data mining methods, or, more precisely, learning analytics