A supporting tool in online learning forums based on multi-documents summarization

Abstract

Online discussion groups and forums now hosts millions of users that join them with different purposes, to discuss various matters or ask their questions or providing answers to others' questions. Web 2.0 and online forums provide an environment that supports the following important functionalities: content generation, content and knowledge sharing, synchronous and asynchronous interaction and so on. With increasing usage of collaborative learning these forums and communities are known as a suitable platform that facilitates collaborative activities. Many learners refer to these forums to find answers for their questions. Unfortunately due to huge amount of information on these forums, finding the appropriate answers is becoming more time consuming. In addition, there is no suitable mechanism to measure the reliability of answers being provided. To overcome these challenges a new supporting tool for e-Learning in online communities and forums is proposed. This supporting tool consists of three main components. At first relevant questions to learners query is found. The next component finds the best answers for these relevant questions. Finally, selected answers are summarized and an abstract view of these answers that contains the most important information is returned to the learner. To evaluate the proposed tool the contents of 30 discussions are collected. The results of applying this supporting tool show that it can help learners to find their answers in learning forums more easily.