Combining Automatic Coding and Instructor Input to Generate ENA Visualizations for Asynchronous Online Discussion

Asynchronous online discussions are a common fundamental tool to facilitate social interaction in hybrid and online courses. However, instructors lack the tools to accomplish the overwhelming task of evaluating asynchronous online discussion activities. In this paper we present an approach that uses Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA) and the instructor's keywords to automatically extract codes from a relatively small dataset. We use the generated codes to build an Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) model and compare this model with a previous ENA model built by human coders. The results show that there is no statistical difference between the two models. We present an analysis of these models and discuss the potential use of ENA as a visualization to help instructors evaluating asynchronous online discussions.

Automated Code Extraction from Discussion Board Text Dataset

This study introduces and investigates the capabilities of three different text mining approaches, namely Latent Semantic Analysis, Latent Dirichlet Analysis, and Clustering Word Vectors, for automating code extraction from a relatively small discussion board dataset. We compare the outputs of each algorithm with a previous dataset that was manually coded by two human raters. The results show that even with a relatively small dataset, automated approaches can be an asset to course instructors by extracting some of the discussion codes, which can be used in Epistemic Network Analysis.