{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tracing-forum-posts-to-mooc-content-using","title":"Tracing Forum Posts to MOOC Content using Topic Analysis","arxiv_id":"1904.07307","date":"2019-04-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alexander William Wong","Ken Wong","Abram Hindle"],"abstract":"Massive Open Online Courses are educational programs that are open and\naccessible to a large number of people through the internet. To facilitate\nlearning, MOOC discussion forums exist where students and instructors\ncommunicate questions, answers, and thoughts related to the course.\n  The primary objective of this paper is to investigate tracing discussion\nforum posts back to course lecture videos and readings using topic analysis. We\nutilize both unsupervised and supervised variants of Latent Dirichlet\nAllocation (LDA) to extract topics from course material and classify forum\nposts. We validate our approach on posts bootstrapped from five Coursera\ncourses and determine that topic models can be used to map student discussion\nposts back to the underlying course lecture or reading. Labeled LDA outperforms\nunsupervised Hierarchical Dirichlet Process LDA and base LDA for our\ntraceability task. This research is useful as it provides an automated approach\nfor clustering student discussions by course material, enabling instructors to\nquickly evaluate student misunderstanding of content and clarify materials\naccordingly.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07307v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07307v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tracing-forum-posts-to-mooc-content-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/awwong1/topic-traceability","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"topic-models","task_name":"Topic Models"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"lda","method_name":"LDA"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}