TopicSummary: A Tool for Analyzing Class Discussion Forums using Topic Based Summarizations

This Innovative Practice full paper, describes the application of text mining techniques for extracting insights from a course based online discussion forum through generation of topic based summaries. Discussions, either in classroom or online provide opportunity for collaborative learning through exchange of ideas that leads to enhanced learning through active participation. Online discussions offer a number of benefits namely providing additional time to reflect and synthesize information before writing, providing a natural platform for students to voice their ideas without any one student dominating the conversation, and providing a record of the student's thoughts. An online discussion forum provides a repository comprising the discussion threads related to the topics discussed. One approach to extracting useful knowledge from the repository is through generation of concise summaries of the discussion for each topic. This summary information can help both the instructor and the student in being able to focus on the key learning points discussed in the forum threads. The focus of our research is directed towards analysis of online discussion forums (ODFs) and generating topic based summaries that can be viewed by both instructor and the students. We have developed a tool, Topic Based Summarization (TBS), that takes an excel sheet with discussion forum thread posts as input and generates visual reports of summaries that are clustered into different topics. We evaluate the tool using discussion thread posts for an undergraduate course titled “Business Process Modelling and Solutioning”. We also performed qualitative analysis of the tool to investigate the strengths and weakness of various summarization algorithms.