MentorMatch: Using student mentors to scaffold participation and learning within an online discussion board

In this paper, we present a novel approach to scaffolding student participation and learning within discussion forums using student mentors, i.e., course peers with relatively good understanding of a particular domain topic. First, we identify mentors using domain topic models, student discussion profiles, and a similarity comparison of the topics being discussed. Second, we provide an interface that encourages classmates to invite mentors to participate. The feature, named MentorMatch, was integrated into an undergraduate course discussion board. Some results are reported.