Visualizing the asynchronous discussion forum data with topic detection

Visualization is a crucial part in learning analytics, where ordinary teachers could comprehend the depth of textual learning (e.g. discussion forum) through the easy-to-interpret figures (e.g. keygraph). However, the open source tools are often not fully developed with plug-in to common learning management system such as Moodle. In this paper, we are going to present the preliminary results of an ongoing project learning analytics extended based on Li & Wong (2016) and Wong & Li (2016), which sets the direction for the next stage of our experiment to aim for a better educational technology application in helping teacher evaluate the learning process of students through analytics. In this project, contents of discussion forums of students were extracted into text files, which were imported to a software tool called Polaris developed by Oshawa Lab (http://www.panda.sys.t.utokyo.ac.jp/KeyGraph/) to generate keygraphs to visualize the scenarios for mining patterns. However, as keygraphs are difficult to comprehend by humans and therefore, more effective tools are needed. In our latest experiments, we deployed novel text mining algorithms and data visualization tools to improve educational analytics intuitively.