The dynamics of social performance and cognitive depth between students and teacher in online discussion forums with the SNA and LDA approach

ABSTRACTOnline discussion forums are crucial educational tools that facilitate interaction between students and teachers. We created an online discussion forum, with the teacher serving as the moderator. 58 posts and 1,955 comments were collected. We analysed these data through Latent Dirichlet Allocation to determine word cooccurrence and extract key topics from the discussions. We examined how the topics and depth of the discussion changed over time and the roles that the students and teacher played in the forum by using time-series data. The results indicate that the teacher played a crucial role in the forum by initially serving as a moderator and then guiding or prompting students to discuss certain topics. Those who participated more actively achieved higher grades, and those that were passive had lower grades at the end Overall, the online discussion forum enhanced the course by helping students understand the core materials and topics in the course.KEYWORDS: Higher educationonline discussion forumLatent Dirichlet Allocationtime-series data Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Science Foundation Youth Foundation of China [62207026].Notes on contributorsWei XuWei Xu is an associate professor at the College of Educational Science and Technology of Zhejiang University of Technology. Her current research interests include instruction system design, museum learning, and the deep integration of information technology and curriculum. She has published papers in the Journal of Distance Education, China Educational Technology, and Modern Educational Technology.Yuhan ChenYuhan Chen is a postgraduate student at the Department of Education Information Technology of East China Normal University. Her current research interests include artificial intelligence technology application in education.Leying YangLe-Ying Yang is a postgraduate student at the College of Educational Science and Technology of Zhejiang University of Technology. Her current research interests include instruction system design and the deep integration of information technology and curriculum.