Finding MOOCs Insights from Forum Dynamics

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Final Year Thesis Oral Presentation

Title: "Finding MOOCs Insights from Forum Dynamics"

by

Ms. TU Jiayang 


Abstract: 

MOOCs have become a popular topic for recent years, especially when a 
substantial number of online platforms like Coursera have rapidly evolved 
from year 2012 and attracted plenty of learners due to their integration 
of the most excellent courses from elite universities all over the world.

However, different from conventional education, e-learning is regarded as 
an independent study pattern with very few instructor-to-student 
interactions and limited approaches for help. Based on this problem, 
researchers have inspected the course forums and strived to figure out the 
study patterns of learners to evaluate the effectiveness of online 
education. Most of the researches have successful proposed useful methods 
to promote the quality of teaching as well as help stimulate students’ 
passion to keep learning.

In this thesis, we have developed a forum scraper as well as a profile 
scraper that are both applicable to the most common forum structure of 
Coursera. Leveraging our own datasets, we have performed multiple 
visualization and analysis. We have gained interesting and intuitive 
insights concerning the motivation of students in using the forums, 
activeness of the forum activities as well as the influences of the active 
users.


Date                 : 30 April 2016 (Saturday)

Time                 : 9:00am to 9:40am

Venue                : Room 2127A (lift 19)

Advisor              : Dr. Xin LI

2nd Reader           : Prof. D.Y. YEUNG