FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: Automated analysis and scoring of online learning forum posts
Suggested By: Ali Dewan
Last Update: April 17th, 2025

Discussion forums play a crucial role in improving student interaction and exchange ideas in online courses. These forums provide an essential platform for peer engagement among online learners. For instructors, assessing forum posts is a valuable way to evaluate students' knowledge, comprehension, and writing skills. However, manually grading a large volume of posts is time-consuming. Automating this process could significantly reduce instructors' workloads in online courses while enhancing student learning. The primary goal of this research is to develop an automated grading system for online discussion posts by assessing factors such as writing quality, relevance to the topic, and cognitive depth. This study will explore various computational linguistic models, cognitive science, psychology concepts, deep learning (DL), and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to achieve this. The research will address several key questions: How can NLP and DL techniques be leveraged to evaluate the quality and relevance of online discussion posts? Which linguistic features—such as lexical, syntactic, and semantic—are most effective in predicting the academic value of these posts? How can cognitive depth, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling enhance automatic scoring? Additionally, the study will investigate how integrating peer assessment data affects the reliability and validity of automated scoring. The outcomes of this research are expected to improve the learner experience by fostering a sense of community in online learning and will also enhance instructor efficiency in marking and grading students' discussion posts. It aligns and advances the Alberta Innovates Stream II focus on “Advanced management and analytics (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning)” by applying and optimizing emerging technologies in education. The proposal intends to position both Alberta and Canada as leaders in innovations in online learning.