The Influence of Teacher Interactions on Sentiment Development in MOOC Discussion Forums

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are delivering rich learning content to a variety of audiences. Next to the learning material, the discussion forums play a major role in the success of MOOCs. A healthy climate in the discussions is of great importance for the motivation of the instructors and the participants. We have employed a sentiment analyzer to observe the development of the discussions in several of our courses. We expect to obtain a better understanding of the development in the discussions, the influence of the instructors' interventions on this behavior, and to some extent the dropout and course completion development.