Bringing order to chaos in MOOC discussion forums with content-related thread identification

Alyssa Friend Wise, Yi Cui, Jovita Vytasek

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This study addresses the issues of overload and chaos in MOOC discussion forums by developing a model to categorize and identify threads based on whether or not they are substantially related to the course content. Content-related posts were defined as those that give/seek help for the learning of course material and share/comment on relevant resources. A linguistic model was built based on manually-coded starting posts in threads from a statistics MOOC (n=837) and tested on thread starting posts from the second offering of the same course (n=304) and a different statistics course (n=298). The number of views and votes threads received were tested to see if they helped classification. Results showed that content-related posts in the statistics MOOC had distinct linguistic features which appeared to be unrelated to the subject-matter domain; the linguistic model demonstrated good cross-course reliability (all recall and precision > .77) and was useful across all time segments of the courses; number of views and votes were not helpful for classification.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLAK 2016 Conference Proceedings, 6th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference - Enhancing Impact
Subtitle of host publicationConvergence of Communities for Grounding, Implementation, and Validation
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages188-197
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341905
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 25 2016
Event6th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, LAK 2016 - Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Duration: Apr 25 2016Apr 29 2016

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Volume25-29-April-2016

Other

Other6th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, LAK 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityEdinburgh
Period4/25/164/29/16

Keywords

  • Discussion forum
  • Machine learning
  • Massive open online courses
  • Natural language processing
  • Social interaction

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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