Analyzing the Relationship between Multi-role Presence and Students’ Learning Outcomes in a SPOC Forum

With the advent of educational big data, a large amount of interactive data is being generated every day in online collaborative learning platforms. This data contains a wide variety of social network interaction information of learners, especially for the presence of multiple roles (such as teachers, assistants, and so on) in the network, which is quite valuable and has a great impact on forum discussions, the evolution of social network structures, and the learning effects of students. By analyzing the social network characteristics of students, mainly including the role of participants in forum discussions and the evolutionary trend of network structures, this paper investigates not only the relationship between the multiple roles engaged in curriculum and the learning outcomes of students, and also impact on forum discussions. Our results show that firstly, the more active the students are in the forum discussions, the higher their learning outcomes will be achieved. Secondly, the participation of multiple roles can increase the enthusiasm of discussions in the forum, i.e. with the presence of teachers, assistants and other roles in curriculum, students can participate more actively in the forum discussions. Finally, our results could potentially enable teachers, administrators, and students to use online learning discussion forums more effectively, with the same purpose to achieve better learning outcomes for students.