Structurization of information for group work in an online environment

2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)

2013

Online discussion forums represent, nowadays, one of the main asynchronous communication means and information sources over the Internet. The forum paradigm is adopted by the most followed websites, such as social networks and blogs. The effectiveness of discussion forums as information source, i.e., the capability to satisfy their users' information needs, depends on their information richness first, but also on how their are organized and effectively moderated. Forums organized and moderated by topics of discussion tend to host messages on related subjects and, overall, provide a classification of message threads which eases information search.In this paper we propose a semi-automatic approach to detect topics of discussion in a forum and to enhance its organization by providing a hierarchical topic-driven navigation view on its messages. We adopt Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, such as topic modeling, and formal concept analysis (FCA) to identify discussion topics and to provide a hierarchical topic-centered view on messages.We tested the validity of our approach on four forums of the elearning platform of an Italian distance-learning university which provides around 20 moderated and unmoderated main forums followed actively by almost 5000 users, including students and teachers, each year. We validated the topics identification and messages to topics allocation process with a specific empirical experiment obtaining promising results.

Section: Documents To Topics Assignment Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic-driven semi-automatic reorganization of online discussion forums: A case study in an e-learning context

Cerulo

2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)

2013

“…Association-rules mining has been widely adopted in e-learning, specifically in recommendation systems (Za íane, 2002;Yang et al, 2010), learning material organization (Tsai et al, 2001), student learning assessments (Romero et al, 2005), course adaptation to the student's behaviour (Hogo, 2010) and evaluation of educational Websites (dos Santos Machado and Becker, 2003). The development of cooperative learning and knowledge sharing inside student groups predominates in recent research trends (Jakobsone et al, 2012). In particular, Web technologies take advantage of the opportunities raised by mixing the social and the semantic Web (Ghenname et al, 2012).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kuosa

International Journal of Distance Education Technologies

Tervakari

et al. 2016

This paper presents two interactive visualization tools for learning management systems (LMS) in order to improve learning and teaching in online courses. The first tool was developed at the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (IISLab) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The tool is used to analyse students' activity from automatically recorded user log data and to build interactive visualizations. They provide valuable insights into the learning process and participation of students in a course offered to teachers and students. The second tool was developed at the Unitelma Sapienza University. It extends navigation and search functionalities in the discussion forum of an LMS with a topic-driven paradigm. The tool analyses forum content and automatically identifies discussion topics. It then enhances the original forum with a topic-driven navigation structure and an interactive search graph. Both tools have been developed as plug-ins for the Moodle LMS, but their analysis processes and techniques can be adopted into any LMS.

“…Association Rules mining has been widely adopted in e-learning, in particular recommendation systems (Zaíane, 2002;Yang et al, 2010), learning material organization (Tsai et al, 2001), student learning assessments (Romero et al, 2005), course adaptation to the students behavior (Hogo, 2010), and evaluation of educational websites (dos Santos Machado and Becker, 2003). In educational research the development of cooperative learning and knowledge sharing inside student groups constitute recent research trends (Jakobsone et al, 2012). To this aim, Web technologies should grasp the opportunities raised by mixing the Social and the Semantic Web (Ghenname et al, 2012) and on adopting Semantic and Artificial Intelligence techniques for discovering information objects and restructure large digital collections (Martin and Leon, 2012).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval

Cerulo

Visaggio

et al. 2014

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.