Utilizing Social Media for Goal Setting Based on Observational Learning

Goal-Setting enhances learning by providing a sense of direction and purpose. Often only a few goals are suggested, as a result many learners fail to find the goals that they can relate to. To address this problem, we propose to extract a large number and variety of goals from social media. Learners can then observe goal-based messages from others and adopt the ones they find useful. Conceptually, this approach could be considered a combination of Goal-Setting and Observational Learning. To provide a practical implementation, we automate this process by (1) retrieving a large number of messages from Twitter, (2) classifying which ones contain goals, (3) determining what those goals are.