scholarly journals Teaching a Massive Open Online Course on Natural Language Processing

Author(s):  
Ekaterina Artemova ◽  
Murat Apishev ◽  
Denis Kirianov ◽  
Veronica Sarkisyan ◽  
Sergey Aksenov ◽  
...  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Haniya Ahmed ◽  
Kenny Wong

The purpose of the project is to identify common difficulties that learners may face and to understand their emotions as they progress through MOOCs. MOOC is an abbreviation for the Massive Open Online Course and the research deals with the data from ten different courses from Coursera. The data is used to extract pieces of text that students have made. Then, those certain texts are required to be sent to Google Cloud Natural Language API. This app allows users to get a sentiment analysis of a text. The main goal is to assist instructors with monitoring MOOC to make it more efficient and easier for students to progress since it assists to improve the courses.  To achieve this, the first step is to gather all the data from each of the courses. Then use programming to dump all that data into one big database. The program that is used here is called Pycharm and user is required to use python and sql to aid him in dumping the data in the database. Once the database is created, coding is done to only select out the pieces of information that are needed. These texts should be where students make comments or ask questions. Next, the data is queried to send these texts to Google Cloud Natural Language API. Here, the program breaks down all the sentences to only be just words. Then the program is going to categorize each word according to whether its connotation is positive, negative or neutral. Next, all the words are sorted according to their connotations. The overall sentiment depends on the emotion that has the highest number. If positives and negatives are all balanced out then the sentiment is neutral. Sentiment scores range from -1 to 1, where -1 is the most negative, 1 is the most positive and anywhere near 0 is neutral.  Positive sentiment scores indicate instructors that students are doing well on their course and neutral sentiment scores indicate that the course is balanced out with difficulties and easy tasks. However, negative sentiment is the most important to instructors since it indicates them that students are struggling and they need to improve the course.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changcheng Wu ◽  
Junyi Li ◽  
Ye Zhang ◽  
Chunmei Lan ◽  
Kaiji Zhou ◽  
...  

Nowadays, most courses in massive open online course (MOOC) platforms are xMOOCs, which are based on the traditional instruction-driven principle. Course lecture is still the key component of the course. Thus, analyzing lectures of the instructors of xMOOCs would be helpful to evaluate the course quality and provide feedback to instructors and researchers. The current study aimed to portray the lecture styles of instructors in MOOCs from the perspective of natural language processing. Specifically, 129 course transcripts were downloaded from two major MOOC platforms. Two semantic analysis tools (linguistic inquiry and word count and Coh-Metrix) were used to extract semantic features including self-reference, tone, effect, cognitive words, cohesion, complex words, and sentence length. On the basis of the comments of students, course video review, and the results of cluster analysis, we found four different lecture styles: “perfect,” “communicative,” “balanced,” and “serious.” Significant differences were found between the different lecture styles within different disciplines for notes taking, discussion posts, and overall course satisfaction. Future studies could use fine-grained log data to verify the results of our study and explore how to use the results of natural language processing to improve the lecture of instructors in both MOOCs and traditional classes.


AERA Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 233285842110456
Author(s):  
Joshua Littenberg-Tobias ◽  
Elizabeth Borneman ◽  
Justin Reich

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education. We developed and evaluated a massive open online course ( N = 963) with embedded equity simulations that attempted to equip educators with equity teaching practices. Applying a structural topic model (STM)—a type of natural language processing (NLP)—we examined how participants with different equity attitudes responded in simulations. Over a sequence of four simulations, the simulation behavior of participants with less equitable beliefs converged to be more similar with the simulated behavior of participants with more equitable beliefs ( ES [effect size] = 1.08 SD). This finding was corroborated by overall changes in equity mindsets ( ES = 0.88 SD) and changed in self-reported equity-promoting practices ( ES = 0.32 SD). Digital simulations when combined with NLP offer a compelling approach to both teaching about DEI topics and formatively assessing learner behavior in large-scale learning environments.


2020 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Peter Nabende

Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages is now a mainstream research area. However, there are limited studies on Natural Language Processing applications for many indigenous East African languages. As a contribution to covering the current gap of knowledge, this paper focuses on evaluating the application of well-established machine translation methods for one heavily under-resourced indigenous East African language called Lumasaaba. Specifically, we review the most common machine translation methods in the context of Lumasaaba including both rule-based and data-driven methods. Then we apply a state of the art data-driven machine translation method to learn models for automating translation between Lumasaaba and English using a very limited data set of parallel sentences. Automatic evaluation results show that a transformer-based Neural Machine Translation model architecture leads to consistently better BLEU scores than the recurrent neural network-based models. Moreover, the automatically generated translations can be comprehended to a reasonable extent and are usually associated with the source language input.


Diabetes ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (Supplement 1) ◽  
pp. 1243-P
Author(s):  
JIANMIN WU ◽  
FRITHA J. MORRISON ◽  
ZHENXIANG ZHAO ◽  
XUANYAO HE ◽  
MARIA SHUBINA ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Pamela Rogalski ◽  
Eric Mikulin ◽  
Deborah Tihanyi

In 2018, we overheard many CEEA-AGEC members stating that they have "found their people"; this led us to wonder what makes this evolving community unique. Using cultural historical activity theory to view the proceedings of CEEA-ACEG 2004-2018 in comparison with the geographically and intellectually adjacent ASEE, we used both machine-driven (Natural Language Processing, NLP) and human-driven (literature review of the proceedings) methods. Here, we hoped to build on surveys—most recently by Nelson and Brennan (2018)—to understand, beyond what members say about themselves, what makes the CEEA-AGEC community distinct, where it has come from, and where it is going. Engaging in the two methods of data collection quickly diverted our focus from an analysis of the data themselves to the characteristics of the data in terms of cultural historical activity theory. Our preliminary findings point to some unique characteristics of machine- and human-driven results, with the former, as might be expected, focusing on the micro-level (words and language patterns) and the latter on the macro-level (ideas and concepts). NLP generated data within the realms of "community" and "division of labour" while the review of proceedings centred on "subject" and "object"; both found "instruments," although NLP with greater granularity. With this new understanding of the relative strengths of each method, we have a revised framework for addressing our original question.  


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vadim V. Korolev ◽  
Artem Mitrofanov ◽  
Kirill Karpov ◽  
Valery Tkachenko

The main advantage of modern natural language processing methods is a possibility to turn an amorphous human-readable task into a strict mathematic form. That allows to extract chemical data and insights from articles and to find new semantic relations. We propose a universal engine for processing chemical and biological texts. We successfully tested it on various use-cases and applied to a case of searching a therapeutic agent for a COVID-19 disease by analyzing PubMed archive.


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