How Online Learners Build Cognitive Presence: Implications from a Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Within the last year, the number of students who participate in online learning platforms has exploded. The transition to online platforms has moved discussion out of the classroom and onto digital spaces. To support this transition we aim to create a model which can help teachers and teaching assistants understand how the discourse of learners in discussion forums evolve through multiple phases of cognitive presence over time.To this end, we use cutting-edge natural language processing techniques and apply machine-learning algorithms to build a model that can predict the cognitive presence phase of posts based on the community of inquiry framework.