Discovery of Structural and Temporal Patterns in MOOC Discussion Forums

Abstract

This work aims to explore methods to investigate the structure of knowledge exchange in discussion forums in massive open online courses (MOOCs) explicitly taking into account changing patterns over time. The paper covers three different aspects of forum analysis combining different methods. First, an approach for the extraction of dynamic communication networks from forum data based on the classification of forum posts is presented that takes into account the information exchange relations between forum users. Second, measures that characterise users according to information seeking and information giving behaviour are introduced and the development of individual actors is analysed. Third, blockmodelling and tensor decomposition approaches for reducing a dynamic network to an interpretable macro-structure reflecting knowledge exchange between clusters of actors over time are evaluated. This allows for the analysis of the communication structure related to information exchange between participants of large scale online courses in different aspects. The utility of the analytics framework is demonstrated along two case studies on forum discussions in two MOOCs offered on the Coursera platform.