Education Commons^™

An Intelligent Platform With Automatic Assessment And Engagement Features For Active Online Discussions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Yun-Chen Chen, Bing Tian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a universitycontext, discussion forums are mostly available in Learning and ManagementSystems (LMS) but are often ineffective in encouraging participation due topoorly designed user interface and the lack of motivating factors toparticipate. Our integrated platform with the Telegram mobile app and aweb-based forum, is capable of automatic thoughtfulness assessment of questionsand answers posted, using text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP)methodologies. We trained and applied the Random Forest algorithm to provideinstant thoughtfulness score prediction for the new posts contributed by thestudents, and prompted the students to improve on their posts, thereby invokingdeeper thinking resulting in better quality contributions. In addition, …