DISCUSSION FORUMS AS LEARNING RESOURCES IN WEB-BASED EDUCATION

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DISCUSSION FORUMS AS LEARNING RESOURCES IN WEB-BASED EDUCATION

D. Helic, H. Maurer, and N. Scerbakov

Institute for Information processing and Computer Supported New Media
Graz University of Technology
Inffeldgasse 16c, 8010 Graz Austria


"Discussion forums are very popular and widely applied tools in Web-based education (WBE) systems. Usually, discussion forums are used by learners to discuss topics related to courseware, their current learning task, or the learning project they are working on. These discussion forums contain tremendous educational potential for future learners, since they contain question and answer dialogues, discussions, or examples made by previous learners. Thus, by simply reusing these discussion forums as new learning resources in WBE systems future learners would have very valuable learning information based on the hands-on experience of previous learners. However, implementing such a simple yet powerful idea in WBE systems is not a trivial task. Finding relevant information in discussion forums might be seen as a rather tedious task and the results of such process leave much to be desired. In this paper we present a simple tool that solves problems related to information retrieval in discussion forums and thus allows reuse of the forum content as new learning resources in WBE systems. "

http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/ijca2004.pdf

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Rich