Mining for gold: Identifying content-related MOOC discussion threads across domains through linguistic modeling

This study addresses overload and chaos in MOOC discussion forums by developing a model to categorize threads based on whether or not they are substantially related to course content. A linguistic model was built based on manually coded starting posts in threads from a statistics MOOC, and tested on the second offering of the course, another statistics MOOC, a psychology MOOC, a physiology MOOC, and a test set of reply posts. Results showed that...