Meaningful Learning in Discussion Forums: Towards Discourse Analysis

Meaningful Learning in Discussion Forums: Towards Discourse Analysis

This document presents the analysis of a discussion forum used as a learning component in a ‘management information systems’ university course. By reporting on two macro level measures namely, participation and interaction, we seek to understand the occurrence of any collaborative knowledge-building activities/processes and at the same time work towards discourse analysis. Our analysis is based...

Students' Learning in Asynchronous Discussion Forums: A Meta-Analysis

Qualitative Analysis of Discussion Forums

This paper proposes a qualitative analysis of discussion forums using a particular text mining technique which uses a graph formalism to represent relevant terms found in a text, as well as their relationships. The proposed approach is based on the comparison of graphs extracted from textual contributions made by students, and important terms provided by the teachers related to the topic being ...

Automatic detection of stance towards vaccination in online discussion forums

A classifier for automatic detection of stance towards vaccination in online forums was trained and evaluated. Debate posts from six discussion threads on the British parental website Mumsnet were manually annotated for stance against or for vaccination, or as undecided. A support vector machine, trained to detect the three classes, achieved a macro F-score of 0.44, while a macro F-score of 0.6...

Towards Feasible Instructor Intervention in MOOC discussion forums

Massive Open Online Courses allow numerous people from around the world to have access to knowledge that they otherwise have not. However, high student-to-instructor ratio in MOOCs restricts instructors’ ability to facilitate student learning by intervening in discussions forums, as they do in face-to-face classrooms. Instructors need automated guidance on when and how to intervene in discussio...