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Title: What You Say is Relevant to How You Make Friends: Measuring the Effect of Content on Social Connection
Discussion forums are the primary channel for social interaction and knowledge sharing in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Many researchers have analyzed social connections on MOOC discussion forums. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is little research that distinguishes between the types of connections students make based upon the content of their forum posts. We analyze this effect by distinguishing on- and off-topic posts and comparing their respective social networks. We then analyze how these types of posts and their social connections can be used to predict the students’ final course performance. Pursuant to this work we developed a binary classifier to identify on- and off- topic posts and applied our analysis with the hand-coded and predicted labels. We conclude that the post type does affect the relationship between the students and their closest neighbors or community members clustered communities and their closest neighbor to their learning outcomes.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1821475
PAR ID:
10392256
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Editor(s):
Lynch, Collin F.; Merceron, Agathe; Desmarais, Michel; Nkambou, Roger
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Educational Data Mining
Page Range / eLocation ID:
679 - 682
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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