skip to main content
10.1145/3386527.3405914acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesl-at-sConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

PARQR: Automatic Post Suggestion in the Piazza Online Forum to Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

Published: 12 August 2020 Publication History

Abstract

As enrollment numbers in online courses increase, students, instructors, and teaching assistants have difficulty finding needed information in online forums because of the number of posts, resulting in duplicate posts that exacerbate the problem. We introduce PARQR, a recommendation tool that suggests relevant contributions as participants compose their posts. We investigate the use of PARQR in five online degree-seeking courses. We survey 74 students and interview five teaching assistants to understand their experience with online forums and PARQR. We compare the differences between using and not using PARQR for an online course assignment. PARQR users found the tool to be useful for navigating online forums, and PARQR was effective in reducing the number of posts (0.291 vs. 0.506 posts per active student) and duplicate posts (17.8% vs. 25.6%) in an online course. These results suggest that PARQR makes on-line forums more efficient for users to find needed information.

References

[1]
Fernanda Cesar Bonafini, Chungil Chae, Eunsung Park, and Kathryn Weed Jablokow. 2017. How Much Does Student Engagement with Videos and Forums in a MOOC Affect Their Achievement? Online Learning 21, 4 (dec 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.24059/olj.v21i4.1270
[2]
Lori Breslow, David Pritchard, Jennifer DeBoer, Glenda Stump, Andrew Ho, and Daniel Seaton. 2013. Studying Learning in the Worldwide Classroom: Research into edX's First MOOC. Research in Practice and Assessment (06 2013).
[3]
D.O. Bruff, D.H. Fisher, K.E. McEwen, and Blaine Smith. 2013. Wrapping a MOOC: Student perceptions of an experiment in blended learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 9 (01 2013), 187--199.
[4]
Long Chen, Joemon Jose, Haitao Yu, Fajie Yuan, and Dell Zhang. 2016. A Semantic Graph based Topic Model for Question Retrieval in Community Question Answering. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2835776.2835809
[5]
Cho Kin Cheng, Dwayne E. Pare, Lisa-Marie Collimore, and Steve Joordens. 2011. Assessing the effectiveness of a voluntary online discussion forum on improving students' course performance. Computers & Education 56 (01 2011), 253--261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.07.024
[6]
Derrick Coetzee, Armando Fox, Marti A. Hearst, and Björn Hartmann. 2014. Should your MOOC forum use a reputation system?. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing - CSCW textquotesingle14. ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531657
[7]
Chase Geigle and ChengXiang Zhai. 2016. Scaling up Online Question Answering via Similar Question Retrieval. In Proceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale - L@S textquotesingle16. ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2876034.2893428
[8]
Khe Foon Hew and Wing Sum Cheung. 2014. Students' and instructors' use of massive open online courses (MOOCs): Motivations and challenges. Educational Research Review 12 (jun 2014), 45--58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2014.05.001
[9]
Doris Hoogeveen, Li Wang, Timothy Baldwin, and Karin Verspoor. 2018. Web Forum Retrieval and Text Analytics: A Survey. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 12 (01 2018), 1--163. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1500000062
[10]
Iris Howley, Gaurav Tomar, Diyi Yang, Oliver Ferschke, and Carolyn Penstein Rosé. 2015. Alleviating the Negative Effect of Up and Downvoting on Help Seeking in MOOC Discussion Forums. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, 629--632. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19773-9_78
[11]
David A. Joyner. 2017. Scaling Expert Feedback. In Proceedings of the Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale - L@S 17. ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3051457.3051459
[12]
David A. Joyner and Charles Isbell. 2019. Mastertextquotesingles at Scale. In Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale - L@S textquotesingle19. ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3330430.3333630
[13]
René F. Kizilcec and Sherif Halawa. 2015. Attrition and Achievement Gaps in Online Learning. In Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale - L@S textquotesingle15. ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2724660.2724680
[14]
Muthu Kumar, Min-Yen Kan, Bernard CY Tan, and Kiruthika Ragupathi. 2015. Learning Instructor Intervention from MOOC Forums: Early Results and Issues. International Educational Data Mining Society (2015).
[15]
Laura Pappano. 2012. The Year of the MOOC. The New York Times 2, 12 (2012), 2012.
[16]
Chin Choo Robinson and Hallett Hullinger. 2008. New Benchmarks in Higher Education: Student Engagement in Online Learning. Journal of Education for Business 84, 2 (nov 2008), 101--109. http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/joeb.84.2.101--109
[17]
Carolyn Penstein Rosé and Oliver Ferschke. 2016. Technology Support for Discussion Based Learning: From Computer Supported Collaborative Learning to the Future of Massive Open Online Courses. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 26, 2 (mar 2016), 660--678. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40593-016-0107-y
[18]
Kristin Stephens-Martinez, Marti Hearst, and Armando Fox. 2014. Monitoring MOOCs: Which information sources do instructors value? 79--88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566246
[19]
Judith Uchidiuno, Amy Ogan, Evelyn Yarzebinski, and Jessica Hammer. 2016. Understanding ESL Students' Motivations to Increase MOOC Accessibility. 169--172. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2876034.2893398
[20]
Alyssa Wise, Yi Cui, and Jovita Vytasek. 2016. Bringing order to chaos in MOOC discussion forums with content-related thread identification. 188--197. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2883851.2883916
[21]
Diyi Yang, Mario Piergallini, Iris Howley, and Carolyn Rose. 2014. Forum thread recommendation for massive open online courses. In Educational Data Mining 2014.
[22]
Guangyou Zhou, Fang Liu, Yang Liu, Shizhu He, and Jun Zhao. 2013. Statistical Machine Translation Improves Question Retrieval in Community Question Answering via Matrix Factorization. ACL 2013 - 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference 1 (08 2013), 852--861.

Cited By

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
  • (2024)Scaling Classrooms: A Forum for Practitioners Seeking, Developing and Adapting their Own ToolsProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3664641(563-564)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2023)The L@St Eight Years: A Review of Papers and Authors at Learning @ ScaleProceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3573051.3596192(383-387)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. PARQR: Automatic Post Suggestion in the Piazza Online Forum to Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      L@S '20: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
      August 2020
      442 pages
      ISBN:9781450379519
      DOI:10.1145/3386527
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 12 August 2020

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. computer-assisted instruction
      2. distance learning
      3. online degrees
      4. online forums
      5. recommender systems

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      L@S '20

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)14
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
      Reflects downloads up to 16 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      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
      • (2024)Scaling Classrooms: A Forum for Practitioners Seeking, Developing and Adapting their Own ToolsProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3664641(563-564)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
      • (2023)The L@St Eight Years: A Review of Papers and Authors at Learning @ ScaleProceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3573051.3596192(383-387)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2023
      • (2022)Co-Designing AI Agents to Support Social Connectedness Among Online Learners: Functionalities, Social Characteristics, and Ethical ChallengesProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533534(541-556)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
      • (2022)Post Recommendation System Impact on Student Participation and Performance in an Online AI Graduate CourseProceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3491140.3528280(24-34)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
      • (2022)Automatic content analysis of asynchronous discussion forum transcripts: A systematic literature reviewEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-022-11065-w27:8(11355-11410)Online publication date: 6-May-2022

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media