A Tool to Support the Moderation of Asynchronous Online Discussions
Rodolfo C. Raga Jr. & Jennifer D. Raga
Jose Rizal University, Mandaluyong City, Philippines
jundy.raga@gmail.com, jennie.raga@gmail.com
Maria Rosario D. Rodavia & Arlyn D. Orense
Arellano University, Manila, Philippines
rose.rodavia@gmail.com, arlyn.orense@gmail.com
Raymund Sison
Dela Salle University, Manila, Philippines
Asynchronous online discussion (AOD) forums are increasingly becoming a ubiquitous tool for promoting interaction and learning among students in open and distance learning environments. However, generating high-quality interactions in the non-visual and text-based setting of this tool requires a lot of effort on the part of the teacher-moderators. There is a need to develop tools that can provide automated assistance to teachers utilizing AOD forums. Our study seeks to address two issues related to this concern. The first relates to monitoring forum contributions and their relevance to the topic of discussion, and the second examines the feasibility of assessing message contributions relative to specific concepts. In this paper we aim to share our work regarding the first issue. We present an overview of the strategy we adopted in the development of our system, which combines the semantic properties of words with some statistical properties of text to develop a method that can be used to compare the topic relevance of message contents. We also present the features of our proposed system that make it suitable for educational application, in particular its ability to generate acceptable performance using as few human resources as possible. This paper also describes the experiments we conducted to analyze the performance of our system by running it through several messages of an actual forum transcript, and discusses how the results obtained compare with a human coded set of results. Although we are only at the beginning of our work, the initial results, we believe, are encouraging enough to merit further investigation.