ANALYSIS OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE AND STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN ONLINE DISCUSSIONS

In recent years, a growing number of educational programs world-wide have adopted technology solutions in their classrooms. Usage of discussion forums, message boards, bulletin boards, polls, and other components of online learning is commonly seen in many classrooms. This study examines the relationship between student participation in online discussions and student performance in two undergraduate courses (one lower tier course and one upper tier course) and one graduate course (master’s level course) in an Information Systems school at a Singapore tertiary educational institution. In particular, this study examines student participation statistics such as participation frequency and reciprocity as indicators of future student performance including component grades and course grade. Further, we perform text mining on message content to derive insights about frequently discussed topics, etc. We built a system complementary to the university-wide Learning Management System (LMS) so that the new system can be easily configured via a web-based dashboard to pull and analyze different kinds of learning behavior data captured by the LMS.