Investigating social and semantic user roles in MOOC discussion forums

This paper describes the analysis of the social and semantic structure of discussion forums in massive open online courses (MOOCs) in terms of information exchange and user roles. To that end, we analyse a network of forum users based on information-giving relations extracted from the forum data. Connection patterns that appear in the information exchange network of forum users are used to define specific user roles in a social context. Semantic roles are derived by identifying thematic areas in which an actor seeks for information (problem areas) and the areas of interest in which an actor provides information to others (expertise). The interplay of social and semantic roles is analysed using a socio-semantic blockmodelling approach. The results show that social and semantic roles are not strongly interdependent. This indicates that communication patterns and interests of users develop simultaneously only to a moderate extent. In addition to the case study, the methodological contribution is in combining traditional blockmodelling with semantic information to characterise participant roles.