Research Of Discussions On SPOC Forum Based On Social Network And Topic Model

The birth of Small Private Online Course(SPOC)inspired the new ideas of education around the world.The application of online learning to classroom teaching not only makes up for the shortage of teaching resources in classroom,but also breaks through the barriers of time and space in classroom teaching.Since the SPOC was put forward,the online learning platforms which are designed based on it have sprung up all over the world.At present,the SPOC teaching platforms constructed in our country mainly serve teachers and students in colleges and universities.These platforms not only provide massive and diverse teaching resources for students,but also provide special online module such as course discussion area and commenting area,which support the online interaction between teachers and students and student groups technically.With a purpose of providing guidance for improving the teaching patterns in SPOC learning platform,this paper took the StarC platform of Central China Normal University as the research scene,and went through the research path of combining social network analysis and topic model to comprehensively analyze the interaction mode between teachers and students,the evolution characteristics of interaction network and the interest topics of students in StarC forum from the aspects of social relations and interactive content.The research work done in this paper includes:(1)Retrieving the literatures in the same field as this study,summarizing the research status of SPOC,social network analysis and topic model at home and abroad,and enlightening the new ideas of this study.(2)Relying on the StarC platform in Central China Normal University,selecting course and research objects from MySQL database which stores forum data,and then collecting and processing the data of teachers' id,students' id,posting time,posting content and posting id on the forum.Next,defining the construction rules of the social network of the forum according to the functions supported by the StarC forum module.After that,building social network of the course forum in which teachers and students on the forum were regarded as network nodes,and the discussion relationships were regarded as edges.(3)Analyzing the basic attributes,structural evolution,node attributes,node location characteristics,centrality and cohesive subgroups of the interaction network on the course forum through social network analysis method.Then mining the relationship between the position and centrality of students in the forum interaction network and their final grades.(4)Basing on the students' information in interaction network acquired by social network analysis,building the Net-LDA topic.model with the integration of individuals'interactive network information.Then merging the students' network information and text data on forum,and mining the topic interests when participating in forum discussion of students with different interactive information labels through Net-LDA.(5)Basing on the analysis results of social network and Net-LDA experiment,summarizing the discussion patterns of students on course forum,and providing suggestions on how to improve teaching strategies on SPOC forum for teachers.