Towards an integration of text and graph clustering methods as a lens for studying social interaction in MOOCs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>In this paper, we describe a novel methodology, grounded in techniques from the field of machine learning, for modeling emerging social structure as it develops in threaded discussion forums, with an eye towards application in the threaded discussions of massive open online courses (MOOCs). This modeling approach integrates two simpler, well established prior techniques, namely one related to social network structure and another related to thematic structure of text. As an illustrative application of the integrated technique’s use and utility, we use it as a lens for exploring student dropout behavior in three different MOOCs. In particular, we use the model to identify twenty emerging subcommunities within the threaded discussions of each of the three MOOCs. We then use a survival model to measure the impact of participation in identified subcommunities on attrition along the way for students who have participated in the course discussion forums of the three courses. In each of three MOOCs we find evidence that participation in two to four subcommunities out of the twenty is associated with significantly higher or lower dropout rates than average. A qualitative post-hoc analysis illustrates how the learned models can be used as a lens for understanding the values and focus of discussions within the subcommunities, and in the illustrative example to think about the association between those and detected higher or lower dropout rates than average in the three courses. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that the patterns that emerge make sense: It associates evidence of stronger expressed motivation to actively participate in the course as well as evidence of stronger cognitive engagement with the material in subcommunities associated with lower attrition, and the opposite in subcommunities associated with higher attrition. We conclude with a discussion of ways the modeling approach might be applied, along with caveats from limitations, and directions for future work.</p>
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".