Towards Identifying the Resolvability of Threads in MOOCs

Abstract

One important function of the discussion forums of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is for students to post problems they are unable to resolve and receive help from their peers and instructors. There are a large proportion of threads that are not resolved to the satisfaction of the students for various reasons. In this paper, we attack this problem by firstly constructing a conceptual model validated using a Structural Equation Modeling technique, which enables us to understand the factors that influence whether a problem thread is satisfactorily resolved. We then demonstrate the robustness of these findings using a predictive model that illustrates how accurately those factors can be used to predict whether a thread is resolved or unresolved. Experiments conducted on one MOOC show that thread resolveability connects closely to our proposed five dimensions and that the predictive ensemble model gives better performance over several baselines.