Learning about social learning in MOOCs: From statistical analysis to generative model. Christopher G. Brinton, Mung Chiang, Shaili Jain, Henry Lam, Zhenming Liu, Felix Ming Fai Wong (Submitted on 8 Dec 2013 (v1), last revised 19 Dec 2013 (this version, v2)). [The authors are researchers from the EDGE Lab at Princeton University, together with collaborators at Boston University and Microsoft Corporation]

“We study user behavior in the courses offered by a major Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) provider during the summer of 2013. Since social learning is a key element of scalable education in MOOCs and is done via online discussion forums, our main focus is in understanding forum activities. Two salient features of MOOC forum activities drive our research: 1. High decline rate: for all courses studied, the volume of discussions in the forum declines continuously throughout the duration of the course. 2. High-volume, noisy discussions: at least 30% of the courses produce new discussion threads at rates that are infeasible for students or teaching staff to read through. Furthermore, a substantial portion of the discussions are not directly course-related.
We investigate factors that correlate with the decline of activity in the online discussion forums and find effective strategies to classify threads and rank their relevance. Specifically, we use linear regression models to analyze the time series of the count data for the forum activities and make a number of observations, e.g., the teaching staff’s active participation in the discussion increases the discussion volume but does not slow down the decline rate. We then propose a unified generative model for the discussion threads, which allows us both to choose efficient thread classifiers and design an effective algorithm for ranking thread relevance. Our ranking algorithm is further compared against two baseline algorithms, using human evaluation from Amazon Mechanical Turk.”