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Superposter behavior in MOOC forums

Published: 04 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Discussion forums, employed by MOOC providers as the primary mode of interaction among instructors and students, have emerged as one of the important components of online courses. We empirically study contribution behavior in these online collaborative learning forums using data from 44 MOOCs hosted on Coursera, focusing primarily on the highest-volume contributors---"superposters"---in a forum. We explore who these superposters are and study their engagement patterns across the MOOC platform, with a focus on the following question---to what extent is superposting a positive phenomenon for the forum? Specifically, while superposters clearly contribute heavily to the forum in terms of quantity, how do these contributions rate in terms of quality, and does this prolific posting behavior negatively impact contribution from the large remainder of students in the class?
We analyze these questions across the courses in our dataset, and find that superposters display above-average engagement across Coursera, enrolling in more courses and obtaining better grades than the average forum participant; additionally, students who are superposters in one course are significantly more likely to be superposters in other courses they take. In terms of utility, our analysis indicates that while being neither the fastest nor the most upvoted, superposters' responses are speedier and receive more upvotes than the average forum user's posts; a manual assessment of quality on a subset of this content supports this conclusion that a large fraction of superposter contributions indeed constitute useful content. Finally, we find that superposters' prolific contribution behavior does not `drown out the silent majority'---high superposter activity correlates positively and significantly with higher overall activity and forum health, as measured by total contribution volume, higher average perceived utility in terms of received votes, and a smaller fraction of orphaned threads.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    L@S '14: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference
    March 2014
    234 pages
    ISBN:9781450326698
    DOI:10.1145/2556325
    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 ACM 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]

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    Published: 04 March 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. collaborative learning
    2. coursera
    3. data mining
    4. education
    5. massive open online course
    6. mooc
    7. online forums

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    L@S 2014
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    L@S 2014: First (2014) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
    March 4 - 5, 2014
    Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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    L@S '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 14 of 38 submissions, 37%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)The Feature and Diversity of Learners' Performance on Different MOOC Forums in the Online Learning EraInternational Journal of Distance Education Technologies10.4018/IJDET.35026722:1(1-21)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Exploiting Properties of Student Networks to Enhance Learning in Distance EducationInformation10.3390/info1504023415:4(234)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024
    • (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)Experiences from Integrating Large Language Model Chatbots into the ClassroomProceedings of the 2024 on ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V. 110.1145/3649165.3690101(46-52)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024
    • (2024) The role of MOOC forum discussion tasks in learners' cognitive engagement Journal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1300140:5(2103-2120)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
    • (2023)Six principaux freins à l’engagement des apprenants dans les forums de discussion des MOOC de l’université de Genève. Un diagnostic pour mieux soutenir les interactions dans les MOOCDistances et médiations des savoirs10.4000/dms.9629Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Enabling Customization of Discussion Forums for Blind UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35932287:EICS(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Assessing Cheating in MOOCs2023 IEEE Learning with MOOCS (LWMOOCS)10.1109/LWMOOCS58322.2023.10306238(1-6)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Analyzing Social Networks and Learning Content on a Discussion Forum of an Introductory Programming MOOC in Higher Education2023 IEEE Learning with MOOCS (LWMOOCS)10.1109/LWMOOCS58322.2023.10305937(1-6)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Centrality Metrics from Students' Discussion Fora at Distance Education2023 14th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems & Applications (IISA)10.1109/IISA59645.2023.10345914(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
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