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Inferring Students' Sense of Community from Their Communication Behavior in Online Courses

Published: 09 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Sense of community is regarded as the reflection of students' feelings of connectedness with community members and commonality of learning expectations and goals. In online courses, sense of community has been proven to influence students' learning engagement and academic performance. Low sense of community is also one of the reasons for drop out. However, existing studies mainly acquire students' sense of community via questionnaires, which demand user efforts and have difficulty in obtaining real-time feeling during students' learning process. In addition, although communication is helpful to enhance students' sense of community, little work has empirically compared the impact of different online communication tools. In this paper, we are motivated to derive students' sense of community from their communication behavior in online courses. Concretely, we first identify a set of features that are significantly correlated with students' sense of community, which not only include their activities carried out in both synchronous and asynchronous online learning environment, but also their linguistic content in conversational texts. We then develop inference model to unify these features for determining students' sense of community, and find that LASSO performs the best in terms of inference accuracy.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UMAP '17: Proceedings of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
      July 2017
      420 pages
      ISBN:9781450346351
      DOI:10.1145/3079628
      • General Chairs:
      • Maria Bielikova,
      • Eelco Herder,
      • Program Chairs:
      • Federica Cena,
      • Michel Desmarais
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      Published: 09 July 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. online learning
      2. prediction
      3. sense of community
      4. synchronous/ asynchronous communication

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      • Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC)

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      UMAP '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 80 submissions, 36%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 162 of 633 submissions, 26%

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      • (2023)TOUCH: A Multi-sensory Communication System that Communicates EmotionsProceedings of the 16th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments10.1145/3594806.3594860(347-356)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
      • (2023)Classroom Community and Online Learning: A Synthesis of Alfred Rovai’s ResearchTechTrends10.1007/s11528-023-00904-367:6(931-944)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
      • (2022)A Social-Ecological Approach to Modeling Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) in Livestreaming CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35550816:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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