Despite the positive claims on the pedagogical use of social annotation and online collaborative writing tools discussed in the literature, most of the findings are derived from interviews or self-reported survey data. Very few studies probed deep into the learning processes and examined students' digital traces and the artefacts they…

Classifying educational forum posts is a longstanding task in the research of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Though this task has been tackled by applying both traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches (e.g., Logistics Regression and Random Forest) and up-to-date Deep Learning (DL) approaches, there lacks a systematic…

Recent advances in computational linguistics and the social sciences have created new opportunities for the education research community to analyze relevant large-scale text data. However, the take-up of these advances in education research is still nascent. In this article, we review the recent automated text methods relevant to educational…

Recent advances in computational linguistics and the social sciences have created new opportunities for the education research community to analyze relevant large-scale text data. However, the take-up of these advances in education research is still nascent. In this article, we review the recent automated text methods relevant to educational…

Many course designers trying to evaluate the experience of participants in a MOOC will find it difficult to track and analyse the online actions and interactions of students because there may be thousands of learners enrolled in courses that sometimes last only a few weeks. This study explores the use of automated sentiment analysis in assessing…

This study explores and characterizes learners' participation patterns in MOOC forums, as well as the factors that correlate with learners' participation. Educational data mining and learning analytics methods were used to retrieve and analyze the learners' interpersonal interaction data, which had accumulated in the Coursera log files. The…

The widespread adoption of digital e-learning environments and other learning technology has provided researchers with ready access to large quantities of data. Much of this data comes from discussion forums and has been studied with analytical methods drawn from social network analysis. However, within this large body of research there exists…

Discussion forums are used to support socio-collaborative learning processes among students in online courses. However, complex forum structures and lengthy discourse require that students spend their limited time searching and filtering through posts to find those that are relevant to them rather than spending that time engaged in other…

Online learning has attracted a large number of participants and is increasingly becoming very popular. However, the completion rates for online learning are notoriously low. Further, unlike traditional education systems, teachers, if any, are unable to comprehensively evaluate the learning gain of each student through the online learning…

We introduce a novel approach to visualizing temporal clickstream behaviour in the context of a degree-satisfying online course, "Habitable Worlds," offered through Arizona State University. The current practice for visualizing behaviour within a digital learning environment is to generate plots based on hand-engineered or coded features…

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a course that is offered fully online and is usually open for enrollment by any individual, with no limit on the number of participants. MOOCs are a popular resource for learning worldwide with over 23 million new learners registering for MOOCs in 2017 alone. Coursera, the most popular MOOC platform, has…

This quantitative, correlational study used learning analytics to examine correlations between predictor variables (student-content, student-instructor, and student-system interactions) and criterion variable (student-student interactions) and to determine if the four predictor variables were significant predictors of grades in graduate students…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

Interaction Analysis has been explored for the initiating topics, turn taking, and asking and answering questions in face-to-face learning environments during the last decades. This study investigated the form and sequence of the questions and answers in an asynchronous environment from a non-interventionist point of view. To conduct the research,…

It is still under debate whether learners' interaction data within e-learning and/or open learning environments could be considered as reflections of their learning experiences to be effective or not. Therefore, it is meaningful to explore the nature of these interactions and to make meaningful conclusions. This study aims to explore what the…