The impact of students and TAs' participation on students' academic performance in MOOC

Massive open online course is now a popular choice for online learners. There are many MOOC platforms all over the world. They provide multiple variants of MOOC. Traditionally, students learn by watching videos and doing online quizzes. Course forum is also an important component of MOOC. It is a good place for opinions sharing and discussion. This paper focuses on the relationship between students' academic performance and their participation in the course forum. It also studies the semantics of both students and TAs' posts in the course forum in order to understand their behavior in the forum. We found those who achieve higher scores tend to be more active in forum. But they also write a higher percentage of posts that are unrelated to the course than those who get lower scores. TAs are not very active in the forum and they have limited impacts. This paper talks about the problems of current course forum participation and presents some suggestions for MOOC forum.