Transitioning to Online Instructions and COVID-19 Response: A View from Mining Emergent College Students Discourse in Online Discussion Forum

• DOI: 10.1007/s40593-024-00411-3
• Publication Date: 2024-06-25T18:08:15Z
• Authors: Yiwen Lin; Nia Nixon
• Keywords: 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak; Online discussion; Online forum; Electronic learning; Computer-Mediated Communication; Discussion board

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted teaching and learning activities in higher education around the world. As universities shifted to remote instruction response pandemic, it is important learn how students engaged during this challenging period. In paper, we examined changes learners’ social cognitive presence online discussion forums prior after instruction. We also extracted emergent topics as an attempt explore what talked about they interacted with their peers. forum posts between 2019 2020 from courses that have been offered repeatedly each term at a four-year university U.S. Our findings suggest exhibited through increased affective language instructions. identified related discourse, which involved sharing personal experience positive sentiments expressing opinions on contemporary events. qualitative analysis further revealed showed rapport empathy towrads others, active sense making of engaging critical discourse. study sheds lights leveraging facilitate learner experiences building classroom community courses. discussed potential for conducting large-scale computational linguistic modeling discourse role artificial intelligence deriving insights behavior scale support learning.