Semantic Organization of Online Discussion Transcripts for Active Collaborative Learning

Asynchronous discussion forums are used increasingly in e-learning in which learners interact in academic and social contexts, whereas some challenges and difficulties exist pertaining to the activity and variability in learner participation and collaboration. To motivating and facilitating active collaborative learning, this paper describes the design of an enhanced asynchronous discussion forum. Base on the domain ontology and text mining technologies, discussion transcripts are automatically processed for structural modeling with semantic association, which lays the foundation for the fulfillment of distinctive functionalities in the discussion forum (i.e. semantic search, thematic navigation and recommendation). An experimental study is conducted to show that the approach is effective to discover learning peers with same interests and search for related messages with thematic navigational guidance.