Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with a Topic-driven Navigational Paradigm - A Plugin for the Moodle Learning Management System

Abstract

One of the most popular means of asynchronous communication and most rich repository of user generated information over the Internet is represented by online discussion forums. The capability of a forum to satisfy users' needs as an information source is mainly determined by its richness in information, but also by the way its content (messages and message threads) is organized and made navigable and searchable. To ease content navigation and information search in online discussion forums we propose an approach that introduces in them a complementary navigation structure which enables searching and navigating forum contents by topic of discussion, thus enabling a topic-driven navigational paradigm. Discussion topics and hierarchical relations between them are extracted from the forum textual content with a semi-automatic process, by applying Information Retrieval techniques, specifically Topic Models and Formal Concept Analysis. Then, forum messages and discussion threads are associated to discussion topics on a similarity score basis. In this paper we present an implementation of our approach for the Moodle learning management system, opening to the application of the approach to several real e-learning contexts. We also show with a case study that the new topic-driven navigation structure improves information search tasks with respect to using Moodle standard full-text search.

Engagement of Students in Data Visualization for the Purpose of E-Learning Improvement

“…It should be noted that various e-platforms have become popular in different regions of the world. Today, Moodle is the most commonly used learning management system in the world; it has over 80 million registered users in more than 230 countries [3]. The platform has also been introduced in Russian universities [4].…”

Interactive Visualization Tools to Improve Learning and Teaching in Online Learning Environments

“…To support the discovery and retrieval of relevant information in discussion forums in the e-learning environment of distance-learning through the Unitelma Sapienza University, we defined a data analysis process that exploits information retrieval techniques. It employs topic models (Blei, 2011) and formal concept analysis (Ganter and Wille, 1999) to identify the topics discussed in a given forum and to provide topic-driven searches and navigation (Cerulo and Distante, 2013) (Distante et al, 2014).…”