Supportive technologies for group discussion in MOOCs

A key hurdle that prevents MOOCs from reaching their transformative potential in terms of making valuable learning experiences available to the masses is providing support for students to make use of the resources they can provide for each other. This paper lays the foundation for meeting this challenge by beginning with a case study and computational modeling of social interaction data. The analysis yields new knowledge that informs design and development of novel, real-time support for building healthy learning communities that foster a high level of engagement and learning. We conclude by suggesting specific areas for potential impact of new technology

Wide-Scale Automatic Analysis of 20 Years of ITS Research

The analysis of literature within a research domain can provide significant value during preliminary research. While literature reviews may provide an in-depth understanding of current studies within an area, they are limited by the number of studies which they take into account. Importantly, whilst publications in hot areas abound, it is not feasible for an individual or team to analyse a large volume of publications within a reasonable amount of time. Additionally, major publications which have gained a large number of citations are more likely to be included in a review, with recent or fringe publications receiving less inclusion. We provide thus an automatic methodology for the large-scale analysis of literature within the Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) domain, with the aim of identifying trends and areas of research from a corpus of publications which is significantly larger than is typically presented in conventional literature reviews. We illustrate this by a novel analysis of 20 years of ITS research. The resulting analysis indicates a significant shift of the status quo of research in recent years with the advent of novel neural network architectures and the introduction of MOOCs

Author-Topic Modeling of DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology (2008-2017), India

This study presents a method to analyze textual data and applying it to the field of Library and Information Science. This paper subsumes a special case of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Author-Topic models where each article has one unique author and each author has one unique topic. Topic Modeling Toolkit is used to perform the author-topic modeling. The study further which considers topics and their changes over time by taking into account both the word co-occurrence pattern and time. 393 full-text articles were downloaded from DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology and were analyzed accordingly. 16 core topics have been identified throughout the period of ten years. These core topics can be considered as the core area of research in the journal from 2008 to 2017. This paper further identifies top five authors associated with the representative articles for each studied year. These authors can be treated as the subject-experts for the modeled topics as indicated. The results of the study can serve as a platform to determine the research trend; core areas of research; and the subject-experts related to those core areas in the field the Library and Information Science in India

Feature Augmentation for Improved Topic Modeling of Youtube Lecture Videos using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Application of Topic Models in text mining of educational data and more specifically, the text data obtained from lecture videos, is an area of research which is largely unexplored yet holds great potential. This work seeks to find empirical evidence for an improvement in Topic Modeling by pre- extracting bigram tokens and adding them as additional features in the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, a widely-recognized topic modeling technique. The dataset considered for analysis is a collection of transcripts of video lectures on Machine Learning scraped from YouTube. Using the cosine similarity distance measure as a metric, the experiment showed a statistically significant improvement in topic model performance against the baseline topic model which did not use extra features, thus confirming the hypothesis. By introducing explainable features before modeling and using deep learning based text representation only at the post-modeling evaluation stage, the overall model interpretability is retained. This empowers educators and researchers alike to not only benefit from the LDA model in their own fields but also to play a substantial role in eorts to improve model performance. It also sets the direction for future work which could use the feature augmented topic model as the input to other more common text mining tasks like document categorization and information retrieval

A Closer Look into Recent Video-based Learning Research: A Comprehensive Review of Video Characteristics, Tools, Technologies, and Learning Effectiveness

People increasingly use videos on the Web as a source for learning. To support this way of learning, researchers and developers are continuously developing tools, proposing guidelines, analyzing data, and conducting experiments. However, it is still not clear what characteristics a video should have to be an effective learning medium. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of 257 articles on video-based learning for the period from 2016 to 2021. One of the aims of the review is to identify the video characteristics that have been explored by previous work. Based on our analysis, we suggest a taxonomy which organizes the video characteristics and contextual aspects into eight categories: (1) audio features, (2) visual features, (3) textual features, (4) instructor behavior, (5) learners activities, (6) interactive features (quizzes, etc.), (7) production style, and (8) instructional design. Also, we identify four representative research directions: (1) proposals of tools to support video-based learning, (2) studies with controlled experiments, (3) data analysis studies, and (4) proposals of design guidelines for learning videos. We find that the most explored characteristics are textual features followed by visual features, learner activities, and interactive features. Text of transcripts, video frames, and images (figures and illustrations) are most frequently used by tools that support learning through videos. The learner activity is heavily explored through log files in data analysis studies, and interactive features have been frequently scrutinized in controlled experiments. We complement our review by contrasting research findings that investigate the impact of video characteristics on the learning effectiveness, report on tasks and technologies used to develop tools that support learning, and summarize trends of design guidelines to produce learning video

PEEK: A Large Dataset of Learner Engagement with Educational Videos

Educational recommenders have received much less attention in comparison to e-commerce and entertainment-related recommenders, even though efficient intelligent tutors have great potential to improve learning gains. One of the main challenges in advancing this research direction is the scarcity of large, publicly available datasets. In this work, we release a large, novel dataset of learners engaging with educational videos in-the-wild. The dataset, named Personalised Educational Engagement with Knowledge Topics PEEK, is the first publicly available dataset of this nature. The video lectures have been associated with Wikipedia concepts related to the material of the lecture, thus providing a humanly intuitive taxonomy. We believe that granular learner engagement signals in unison with rich content representations will pave the way to building powerful personalization algorithms that will revolutionise educational and informational recommendation systems. Towards this goal, we 1) construct a novel dataset from a popular video lecture repository, 2) identify a set of benchmark algorithms to model engagement, and 3) run extensive experimentation on the PEEK dataset to demonstrate its value. Our experiments with the dataset show promise in building powerful informational recommender systems. The dataset and the support code is available publicly

A Probabilistic Approach to Modeling Socio-Behavioral Interactions

In our ever-increasingly connected world, it is essential to build computational models that represent, reason, and model the underlying characteristics of real-world networks. Data generated from these networks are often heterogeneous, interlinked, and exhibit rich multi-relational graph structures having unobserved latent characteristics. My work focuses on building computational models for representing and reasoning about rich, heterogeneous, interlinked graph data. In my research, I model socio-behavioral interactions and predict user behavior patterns in two important online interaction platforms: online courses and online professional networks. Structured data from these interaction platforms contain rich behavioral and interaction data, and provide an opportunity to design machine learning methods for understanding and interpreting user behavior. The data also contains unstructured data, such as natural language text from forum posts and other online discussions. My research aims at constructing a family of probabilistic models for modeling social interactions involving both structured and unstructured data. In the early part of this thesis, I present a family of probabilistic models for online courses for: 1) modeling student engagement, 2) predicting student completion and dropouts, 3) modeling student sentiment toward various course aspects (e.g., content vs. logistics), 4) detecting coarse and fine-grained course aspects (e.g., grading, video, content), and 5) modeling evolution of topics in repeated offerings of online courses. These methods have the potential to improve student experience and focus limited instructor resources in ways that will have the most impact. In the latter part of this thesis, I present methods to model multi-relational influence in online professional networks. I test the effectiveness of this model via experimentation on the professional network, LinkedIn. My models can potentially be adapted to address a wide range of problems in real-world networks including predicting user interests, user retention, personalization, and making recommendations