{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/115782"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/115782","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"An analysis of help seeking in course discussion forums","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-11-11 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-11-11 without embargo terms","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Thakkar, Vyom"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"M.S.","degree_level":"Thesis","degree_discipline":"Electrical & Computer Engr","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Bhat, Suma"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2022,"date_issued":"2022-05","date_published":"2022-05","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:55Z","subjects":["NLP","Discussion Forums","Text Classification"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["Copyright 2022 Vyom Thakkar"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115782","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Bhat, Suma"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Thakkar, Vyom"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2022-05","2022-04-26"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Electrical & Computer Engr"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["M.S."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["NLP","Discussion Forums","Text Classification"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2022 Vyom Thakkar"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115782"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-11-11 without embargo terms","The student, Vyom Thakkar, accepted the attached license on 2022-04-25 at 15:13.","The student, Vyom Thakkar, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2022-04-25 at 15:14.","This Thesis was approved for publication on 2022-04-26 at 17:28.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #17954 on 2022-11-11 at 17:38:07","In the last few years, online learning has become increasingly prevalent in the student learning experience. With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and online courses at colleges and universities, course discussion forums have become an important medium for students to get help and ask questions. These discussion forums are also a medium to get to know other students and participate in class discussion activities. The critical feature of large-scale course discussion forums is that, as the number of students learning online scales, the number of help-seeking questions scale, which can be met with the following options: (1) an increase in the number of course staff attending to these questions, (2) presence of an engaged community of students to actively help out each other or (3) to develop a technique in a way that these critical help-seeking discussion posts can be filtered out from the non-help-seeking posts in order to allow the course staff to deal with them in an efficient manner. In this work, we used a discussion forum dataset from a chemistry course as the primary source of data for the investigations and experiments. We explore the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in order to train models to classify a given text as help-seeking or non-help-seeking. We will explore the use of labeled text data from related domains to expand the primary dataset and experiment with transfer learning to improve classification performance. We also performed a Social Network Analysis (SNA) to determine the correlation between the amount of student interaction on the discussion forums to the course outcome that they received. This work is followed up with a UI/UX exploration of integrating the findings from our work into the existing online course discussion forum experience."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["An analysis of help seeking in course discussion forums"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Bhat, Suma"],"dc:creator":["Thakkar, Vyom"],"dc:date":["2022-05","2022-04-26"],"dc:description":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-11-11 without embargo terms","The student, Vyom Thakkar, accepted the attached license on 2022-04-25 at 15:13.","The student, Vyom Thakkar, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2022-04-25 at 15:14.","This Thesis was approved for publication on 2022-04-26 at 17:28.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #17954 on 2022-11-11 at 17:38:07","In the last few years, online learning has become increasingly prevalent in the student learning experience. With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and online courses at colleges and universities, course discussion forums have become an important medium for students to get help and ask questions. These discussion forums are also a medium to get to know other students and participate in class discussion activities. The critical feature of large-scale course discussion forums is that, as the number of students learning online scales, the number of help-seeking questions scale, which can be met with the following options: (1) an increase in the number of course staff attending to these questions, (2) presence of an engaged community of students to actively help out each other or (3) to develop a technique in a way that these critical help-seeking discussion posts can be filtered out from the non-help-seeking posts in order to allow the course staff to deal with them in an efficient manner. In this work, we used a discussion forum dataset from a chemistry course as the primary source of data for the investigations and experiments. We explore the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in order to train models to classify a given text as help-seeking or non-help-seeking. We will explore the use of labeled text data from related domains to expand the primary dataset and experiment with transfer learning to improve classification performance. We also performed a Social Network Analysis (SNA) to determine the correlation between the amount of student interaction on the discussion forums to the course outcome that they received. This work is followed up with a UI/UX exploration of integrating the findings from our work into the existing online course discussion forum experience."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115782"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2022 Vyom Thakkar"],"dc:subject":["NLP","Discussion Forums","Text Classification"],"dc:title":["An analysis of help seeking in course discussion forums"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Electrical & Computer Engr"],"thesis:degree_level":["Thesis"],"thesis:degree_name":["M.S."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:55Z"}