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PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

Published: 24 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce PARQR, a tool for online education forums that reduces duplicate posts by 40% in a degree seeking online masters program at a top university. Instead of performing a standard keyword search, PARQR monitors questions as students compose them and continuously suggests relevant posts. In testing, PARQR correctly recommends a relevant post, if one exists, 73.5% of the time. We discuss PARQR's design, initial experimental results comparing different semesters with and without PARQR, and interviews we conducted with teaching instructors regarding their experience with PARQR.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Forums, Feedback, and Two Kinds of AI: A Selective History of Learning @ ScaleProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3664667(376-382)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2020)Exploring Automated Question Answering Methods for Teaching AssistanceArtificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/978-3-030-52237-7_49(610-622)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2020

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  1. PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      L@S '19: Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
      June 2019
      386 pages
      ISBN:9781450368049
      DOI:10.1145/3330430
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 24 June 2019

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      Author Tags

      1. Computer-Assisted Instruction
      2. Distance Learning
      3. Online Degrees
      4. Online Forums
      5. Recommender Systems

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      L@S '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 70 submissions, 34%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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      View all
      • (2024)Forums, Feedback, and Two Kinds of AI: A Selective History of Learning @ ScaleProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3664667(376-382)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
      • (2020)Exploring Automated Question Answering Methods for Teaching AssistanceArtificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/978-3-030-52237-7_49(610-622)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2020

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