Investigating Instructor Intervention in MOOC Discussion Forums

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) scale up their class size by eliminating synchronous teaching and the need for students and instructors to be co-located. Yet, the very characteristics that enable scalability of MOOCs also bring significant challenge to its teach. In particular, 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 — the lack of interaction and feelings of isolation have been attributed as reasons for why enrolled students drop from MOOCs.

Using a large sample of forum data culled from Coursera MOOCs we design predictive models to identify discussion threads for the instructor to intervene. Such machine learning models may allow building of dashboards to automatically prompt instructors on when and how to intervene in discussion forums. In the longer term, it may be possible to automate these interventions relieving instructors of this effort. Such automated approaches are essential for allowing good pedagogical practices to scale in the context of MOOC discussion forums.

MOOC Wikification (broken link) is a spinoff from this project with similar objectives.

Publications

@workshop{Chandrasekaran2018b,

title = {Countering Position Bias in Instructor Interventions in MOOC Discussion Forums},

author = {Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran and Min-Yen Kan},

url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-3720},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-07-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications},

pages = {135-142},

publisher = {ACL},

address = {Melbourne, Australia},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {workshop}

}

@misc{Ragupathi2017,

title = {Investigating student learning in online discussion forums through a transactivity framework},

author = {Kiruthika Ragupathi and Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran and Min-Yen Kan and Bernard C.Y. Tan},

url = {https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/papers/KDRissotl2017-final.pdf},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-10-11},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {presentation}

}

@conference{bn,

title = {Using Discourse Signals for Robust Instructor Intervention Prediction},

author = {Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran and Carrie Demmans Epp and Min-Yen Kan and Diane Litman},

url = {/wp-content/uploads/Publications/PDF/Using-Discourse-Signals.pdf

https://github.com/WING-NUS/lib4moocdata

/wp-content/uploads/Publications/poster/Using-Discourse-Signals-poster.pdf},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-17)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {conference}

}

@conference{b_30,

title = {Learning instructor intervention from MOOC forums: Early Results and Issues},

author = {Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran and Min-Yen Kan and Bernard C.Y. Tan and Kiruthika Ragupathi},

url = {/wp-content/uploads/Publications/PDF/Learning instructor intervention from MOOC forums- Early Results and Issues.pdf

https://speakerdeck.com/cmkumar87/learning-instructor-intervention-from-mooc-forums-early-results-and-issues},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-01},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {conference}

}

@conference{b_31,

title = {Towards feasible instructor intervention in MOOC discussion forums},

author = {Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran and Kiruthika Ragupathi and Bernard C.Y. Tan and Min-Yen Kan},

url = {/wp-content/uploads/Publications/PDF/Towards feasible instructor intervention in MOOC discussion forums.pdf

/wp-content/uploads/Publications/poster/Towards feasible instructor intervention in MOOC discussion forums poster.pdf},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (2015)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {conference}

}

Members

• Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran (Project Lead)
• Min-Yen Kan (Professor and Advisor)
• Radhika Nikam (Research Assistant – Alumna)
• An Yahui (Postgrad Intern)
• Divish Dayal (Undergrad Intern)
• Elavarasi Manogaran (Research Assistant – Alumna)
• Calvin Tantio (FYP Student)

Resources

• You can process your Coursera’s SQL data dumps using our free, open source library lib4MOOCdata. This also serves as a codebase to replicate our published findings.
• Coursera Forum Crawler: An Yahui, our visiting PhD intern has built this neat crawler: https://github.com/anyahui120/Coursera-Crawler to scrape Coursera discussion forums.
• Incremental Coursera Forum Crawler – This enhanced version of the Coursera Crawler, pings the MOOC forum for updates and crawls updates (e.g., new posts, new threads) to the forums.

Meeting Minutes

• 21 Sep 2018 –