Massive open online courses (MOOCs) constitute a newcomer to the field of higher education. To understand the emergence of a new Strategic Action Field (SAF), we apply exploratory semantic network analysis to determine how incumbents and challengers apply their social skills in influencing discourse around MOOCs to foster acceptance or rejection of this new phenomenon. For that purpose, we analyse the discourse arising around the MOOCs generated by incumbents – represented by the major newspaper specialized on news from higher education – and challengers – a MOOC platform. We first perform semantic analysis to determine central concepts and major themes that dominated the discourse over the different time periods and then conduct sentiment analysis of the titles to understand the implicit attitudes associated with MOOCs.
