A Computational Method for Enabling Teaching-Learning Process in Huge Online Courses and Communities

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses and e-learning represent the future of the teaching-learning processes through the development of Information and Communication Technologies. They are the response to the new education needs of society. However, this future also presents many challenges such as the processing of online forums when a huge number of messages are generated. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of the subject, but the difficulties in following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may produce the opposite effect. In this paper, we propose a computational method for enabling the educational process in huge online learning communities. This method analyses the forum information through Natural Language Processing techniques and extract the main topics discussed. The results generated improves the management of the forums, increases the effectiveness of the teachers' explanations and reduces the time spent by students to follow the course. The proposal has been complemented with a real case study that shows promising results.Keywords: natural language processing, topic detection, distance learning, online forum, mooc managing, However, there are still challenges that should be specifically addressed in order to achieve the effective ODL provision and to maintain excellent educational standards. One of the most powerful and popular tools are online forums (Mora, Signes Pont, DeMiguel Casado, & Gilart Iglesias, 2015). Online forums are a communication technology tool in education and provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students to the subject. The expected roles of the forums are to increase engagement of students in the subject, promote deep learning, and maintain motivation (Onah et al., 2014).Technological advances and computing methods may provide tools for enhancing these roles and facilitating the educational process. In this way, artificial intelligence approaches based on NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP) should deliver tools specifically aimed at students and teachers to make the assimilation of content and course tracking easier for students, and to provide mechanisms to manage the learning platforms by teachers. The working hypothesis of our research is that this kind of solution can be used to better engage the students and teachers in online platforms with huge forums by enabling the knowledge management and learning-teaching processes. Under our approach, the main objective of our work is to provide automatic tools and applications to facilitate tracking and monitoring online learning communities through the automatic processing of forums of lexical, syntactic, and semantic analysis; clustering; and information retrieval techniques. A Computational Method for Enabling Teaching-Learning Process in Huge Online Courses and Communities Mora, Ferrández, Gil, and Peral 227The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the problem of management and monitoring forums in huge online ...

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