Superposter behavior in MOOC forums

Discussion forums, employed by MOOC providers as the primary mode of interaction among instructors and students, have emerged as one of the important components of online courses. We empirically study contribution behavior in these online collaborative learning forums using data from 44 MOOCs hosted on Coursera, focusing primarily on the highest-volume contributors---"superposters"---in a forum. We explore who these superposters are and study their engagement patterns across the MOOC platform, with a focus on the following question---to what extent is superposting a positive phenomenon for the forum? Specifically, while superposters clearly contribute heavily to the forum in terms of quantity, how do these contributions rate in terms of quality, and does this prolific posting behavior negatively impact contribution from the large remainder of students in the class? We analyze these questions across the courses in our dataset, and find that superposters display above-average engagement across Coursera, enrolling in more courses and obtaining better grades than the average forum participant; additionally, students who are superposters in one course are significantly more likely to be superposters in other courses they take. In terms of utility, our analysis indicates that while being neither the fastest nor the most upvoted, superposters' responses are speedier and receive more upvotes than the average forum user's posts; a manual assessment of quality on a subset of this content supports this conclusion that a large fraction of superposter contributions indeed constitute useful content. Finally, we find that superposters' prolific contribution behavior does not `drown out the silent majority'---high superposter activity correlates positively and significantly with higher overall activity and forum health, as measured by total contribution volume, higher average perceived utility in terms of received votes, and a smaller fraction of orphaned threads.