Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with a Topic-driven Navigational Paradigm - A Plugin for the Moodle Learning Management System

Damiano Distante, Luigi Cerulo, Aaron Visaggio, Marco Leone

2014

Abstract

One of the most popular means of asynchronous communication and most rich repository of user generated information over the Internet is represented by online discussion forums. The capability of a forum to satisfy users’ needs as an information source is mainly determined by its richness in information, but also by the way its content (messages and message threads) is organized and made navigable and searchable. To ease content navigation and information search in online discussion forums we propose an approach that introduces in them a complementary navigation structure which enables searching and navigating forum contents by topic of discussion, thus enabling a topic-driven navigational paradigm. Discussion topics and hierarchical relations between them are extracted from the forum textual content with a semi-automatic process, by applying Information Retrieval techniques, specifically Topic Models and Formal Concept Analysis. Then, forum messages and discussion threads are associated to discussion topics on a similarity score basis. In this paper we present an implementation of our approach for the Moodle learning management system, opening to the application of the approach to several real e-learning contexts. We also show with a case study that the new topic-driven navigation structure improves information search tasks with respect to using Moodle standard full-text search.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Distante D., Cerulo L., Visaggio A. and Leone M. (2014). Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with a Topic-driven Navigational Paradigm - A Plugin for the Moodle Learning Management System . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-048-2, pages 97-106. DOI: 10.5220/0005078600970106

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir14,
author={Damiano Distante and Luigi Cerulo and Aaron Visaggio and Marco Leone},
title={Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with a Topic-driven Navigational Paradigm - A Plugin for the Moodle Learning Management System},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={97-106},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005078600970106},
isbn={978-989-758-048-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2014)
TI - Enhancing Online Discussion Forums with a Topic-driven Navigational Paradigm - A Plugin for the Moodle Learning Management System
SN - 978-989-758-048-2
AU - Distante D.
AU - Cerulo L.
AU - Visaggio A.
AU - Leone M.
PY - 2014
SP - 97
EP - 106
DO - 10.5220/0005078600970106