Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Groups and Individuals in an Online Learning Forum

Abstract

Abstract-Time plays a fundamental role that benefits and challenges online discussions. It requires considering the temporal aspect for both analyzing how learning takes places through online discussion and for designing effective structures to support discussion activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the temporal patterns of group and individual participation in a discussion forum. Data were collected from the logs and postings of college students. This study first investigated the temporal patterns of group participation in the discussion forum and then analyzed how promptness and initiative of individuals in online discussion related to their grades at the end of the semester. Results revealed that students posted mainly in the first 23 days and at the deadline. Students preferred discussing something related to the course content with others as soon as possible after they learned. They were willing to post in the morning and evening. There was strong relationship between students' promptness and initiative in the online discussions and their grades. Reasons for these results are discussed.Index Terms-discussion forum, temporal pattern, pace, sequence I. INTRODUCTIONOnline discussion deals with the time and space restrictions that occur in traditional class. It has been widely used to support interaction between students in online courses. It allows students to seek help, offer advice, and receive others' perceptions by reading and responding to postings [1]. The asynchronous nature of online discussion provides the flexibility of the temporal scale or duration of an activity [2,3]. Students could take as much time as they needed to reflect on the others' perceptions and to contribute their own ideas in responses at their own convenience [4]. That means students could compose thoughts at their own speed rather than rushing to comment before others move on [5].The asynchrony of online discussion, which refers to communication across "delayed time" [6], also presents challenges to meaningful conversation. For example, students must log in to the discussion forum repeatedly and wait for unknown and variable amounts of time for responses to their comments [7]. Longer response times can inhibit students' expectations and need for acknowledgement [8].Time plays a fundamental role that benefits and challenges online discussions. Effective online discussion requires considering the temporal factors of discussion activity [9]. Understanding students' participation patterns in the online discussion forum from a temporal perspective could enhance explanatory power, support discussion progress, and facilitate student learning. Teachers could utilize this temporal knowledge to choose appropriate timeframes to build discussion activities or monitor discussions in real-time to decide when a new discussion topic is needed. The exploration of the temporal patterns would also suggest alternative ways to anticipate and design discussion intervals and environments to promote higher levels of discussion. Despite the i...

Topic Sentiment Analysis in Online Learning Community from College Students

“…In the realization of AEM, much attention has been paid towards discoveries of the expressed sentiments in the applications of academic recommender system (Kaklauskas, Zavadskas, & Seniut, 2013), opinion leader identification (Li, Ma, & Zhang, 2013), forum topic mining (Cheng et al, 2015;Colace, Santo, & Luca Greco, 2014), and community quality analysis (Ghiasifard et al, 2015), etc. However, all the available methods mentioned above are unable to highlight the identification and visualization of topic sentiment based on learning topic mining and sentiment clustering at various granularity-levels.…”