Title: Supporting Students’ Online Academic Help Seeking with an Analytics-enhanced Forum
Stream: Design, Implementation & Assessment of Innovative Technologies in Education
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Yun Dai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Ang Liu, University of New South Wales, Australia
Ziyan Lin, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract:
The course discussion forum is a powerful tool for enhancing students’ online academic help seeking (OAHS) in large college classes. Nevertheless, the traditional forums, which usually rank student questions/posts in chronological order, appear to be ineffective in matching the questions with suitable sources of help (helpers). To address this issue, this design-based research proposed an analytics-enhanced forum to improve question-helper matching, thereby promoting the quality of OAHS. In the forum, a novel ontology-based recommender system was developed with a focus on peer matching. To evaluate the effectiveness of the forum, a quasi-experiment was conducted to compare student performances, interests, and OAHS capability between an experimental group adopting the analytics-enhanced forum (n = 307) and a control group utilizing traditional forums (n = 285). Quantitative analysis shows that students in the experimental group had not only outperformed their counterparts academically, but also been more efficient in terms of responding to peer posts and browsing the forum. In addition, the pre- and post- test results indicate that the analytics-enhanced forum increased students’ adaptive OAHS capability with increased interests in online participation. This study shows the affordance of recommender systems and intelligent question-helper matching configurations in facilitating students’ peer learning, online participation, and learning outcomes. The implications of research findings are further discussed in terms of the nature of students’ online help seeking behaviors and design principles of analytics tools and course forums in higher education.
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