OU Social: Reaching Students in Social Media

This work describes OU Social, an application that collects and analyses data from public Facebook groups set up by students to discuss particular Open University courses. This application exploits se- mantic technologies to monitor the behaviour of users over time as well as the topics that emerge from Facebook group discussions. The paper describes the architecture of OU Social and provides a brief overview of the analysis results obtained from 44 different Facebook groups examined over a 6 year period (2007-2013)