Improving online class forums by seeding discussions and managing section size

Zyto, Sacha; Karger, David R.; Mazur, Eric

doi:10.1145/2556325.2567866

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We were inspired by Miller et al (2014), who studied the effect of seeding prior-semester comments in a physics class which contained several annotated discussion readings. They manually assessed students' comments based on a 3-point "quality" scale.…”

Section: Interventions For Improving Learning In Online Forumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their experiment design, different groups of students were exposed to the seeding treatment in different readings, such that all the students were exposed to the treatment by the end of the experiment. Miller et al (2014) compared annotations from students in seeded sections versus unseeded sections by their quality measure, and by an adaptation of (Hogan et al, 1999)'s scheme developed to examine discourse patterns and collaborative scientific reasoning in peer discussions. The researchers found that students in seeded sections produce longer threads, higher quality annotations, and a greater proportion of generative threads than unseeded sections.…”

Section: Interventions For Improving Learning In Online Forumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Seeding Course Forums using the Teacher-in-the-Loop

Shusterman¹,

Kim²,

Facciotti

et al. 2021

LAK21: 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online forums are an integral part of modern day courses, but motivating students to participate in educationally beneficial discussions can be challenging. Our proposed solution is to initialize (or "seed") a new course forum with comments from past instances of the same course that are intended to trigger discussion that is beneficial to learning. In this work, we develop methods for selecting high-quality seeds and evaluate their impact over one course instance of a 186-student biology class. We designed a scale for measuring the "seeding suitability" score of a given thread (an opening comment and its ensuing discussion). We then constructed a supervised machine learning (ML) model for predicting the seeding suitability score of a given thread. This model was evaluated in two ways: first, by comparing its performance to the expert opinion of the course instructors on test/holdout data; and second, by embedding it in a live course, where it was actively used to facilitate seeding by the course instructors. For each reading assignment in the course, we presented a ranked list of seeding recommendations to the course instructors, who could review the list and filter out seeds with inconsistent or malformed content. We then ran a randomized controlled study, in which one group of students was shown seeds that were recommended by the ML model, and another group was shown seeds that were recommended by an alternative model that ranked seeds purely by the length of discussion that was generated in previous course instances. We found that the group of students that received posts from either seeding model generated more discussion than a control group in the course that did not get seeded posts. Furthermore, students who received seeds selected by the ML-based model showed higher levels of engagement, as well

show abstract

Section: Interventions For Improving Learning In Online Forumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interventions For Improving Learning In Online Forumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeding Course Forums using the Teacher-in-the-Loop

Shusterman¹,

Kim²,

Facciotti

et al. 2021

LAK21: 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The use CMC is becoming part of the everyday experience of campus-based students, so is no longer meaningful to ask why students communicate online, but how this CMC could improve their campusbased experience [5]. Although the online discussions have been recognised as a valuable learning process [6][7][8], it is also pointed out that CS students sometimes have poor communication skills [9,10]. Therefore, it is challenging to develop such skills, while this is not part of a typical CS curriculum.…”

Section: Research Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing Computer Science Students Writing Culture in Computer Mediated Communication

Xenos¹

2017

ICERI Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we examine how the students' writing culture changed over time, while using computer mediated communication in two Computer Science courses. We investigate how the students started using mostly casual language in online messages and posts at the courses' e-fora and subsequently, how they adopted a more formal communication with their professors and peers over time. The only driving force for this change was the positive examples from the professors' formal replies, since students never received criticism-or any kind of other feedback-for their casual messages or replies. For this study, we have collected and analysed a total of 315 messages from these two courses, send by 75 individual students. These messages were classified into two categories 'casual' and 'proper', using a set of strict criteria that the fulfilment of all was required for a message to be classified as 'proper'. The results of the analysis of these messages revealed that, using only the professor's formal responses as a positive example, students changed significantly their writing culture over time and, while they had started communicating using casual language at the beginning of each course, after a few weeks they had adopted a more suitable language.

show abstract

“…For instance, network effects [13,1] in a course forum may be large and positive when additional students join a small class, but perhaps negative in a large class, where congestion sets in [18].…”

Section: Proposition 1 and Its Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peers in MOOCs

Williams

2015

Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Economic theory about peers can help learning scientists and designers scale their work from the scale of small classrooms to limitless learning experiences. I propose: 1. We may increase productivity in online learning by changing technologies around peers; many structures around peers can scale with class size. 2. It is not always in students' best interests to be good peers, and collective action failures may worsen with class size. I conducted an experiment in a NovoEd MOOC for teachers that was motivated by these propositions; it leads to future questions about unintended and emergent effects.

show abstract

Improving online class forums by seeding discussions and managing section size

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

Seeding Course Forums using the Teacher-in-the-Loop

Seeding Course Forums using the Teacher-in-the-Loop

Changing Computer Science Students Writing Culture in Computer Mediated Communication

Peers in MOOCs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About