Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized to develop tools and services in various domains, including education. However, due to the nature of the training data, these models are susceptible to inherent social or cognitive biases, which can influence their outputs. Furthermore, their handling of critical topics, such as privacy…

Within the university sector, student recruitment and enrolment are key strategies as institutions strive to attract, retain and engage students. This strategy is underpinned by the provision of services, applications and technologies that facilitate lecturing and support staff. Universities that offer online learning have a particular incentive…

SQL compiler error messages are the primary way users receive feedback when they encounter syntax errors or other issues in their SQL queries. Effective error messages can enhance the user experience by providing clear, informative, and actionable feedback. Despite the age of SQL compilers, it still remains largely unclear what contributes to an…

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a significant change in education. The appearance of these LLMs and their associated chatbots has yielded several advantages for both students and educators, including their use as teaching assistants for content creation or summarisation. This paper aims to evaluate the capacity of LLMs…

Background/Context: Despite the high economic returns to college completion (Avery & Turner, 2012; Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Gulish, 2016), just over half of students who enroll at college attain a bachelor's degree (Bound, Lovenheim, & Turner, 2010; Denning, Eide, & Warnick, 2019; Shapiro et al., 2016). Colleges and non-profits…

Background: Courses in engineering often use peer evaluation to monitor teamwork behaviors and team dynamics. The qualitative peer comments written for peer evaluations hold potential as a valuable source of formative feedback for students, yet little is known about their content and quality. Purpose: This study uses a large language model (LLM)…

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness and potential utility of using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop models that can reliably predict the relative difficulty of incoming chat reference questions. Using a relatively large sample size of chat transcripts (N = 15,690), an empirical experimental design…

Students who take an online course, such as a MOOC, use the course's discussion forum to ask questions or reach out to instructors when encountering an issue. However, reading and responding to students' questions is difficult to scale because of the time needed to consider each message. As a result, critical issues may be left unresolved, and…

This study examined pre-service teachers' perspectives on integrating generative AI (GenAI) tools into their own learning and teaching practices. Discussion posts from asynchronous online courses on ChatGPT were analyzed using the Diffusion of Innovations framework to explore awareness, willingness to apply ChatGPT to instruction, and potential…

There are many ways to learn how to be entrepreneurs and one of the powerful ways is to learn from successful entrepreneurs. However, it is difficult to reach and interview those entrepreneurs about their best practices in doing business in real lives. Chatbot technology can come into play in mimicking conversation of successful entrepreneurs and…

An online peer-assessment system typically allows students to give textual feedback to their peers, with the goal of helping the peers improve their work. The amount of help that students receive is highly dependent on the quality of the reviews. Previous studies have investigated using machine learning to detect characteristics of reviews (e.g.,…

In this study, we work towards a strategy to measure and enhance the quality of interactions in discussion forums at scale. We present a machine learning (ML) model which identifies the phase of cognitive presence exhibited by a student's post and suggest future applications of such a model to help online students develop higher-order thinking. We…

Purpose: With the growth of digital education, students increasingly interact in a variety of ways. The potential effects of these interactions on their learning process are not fully understood and the outcomes may depend on the tool used. This study explores the communication patterns and learning effectiveness developed by students using two…

Online courses often include discussion forums, which provide a rich source of data to better understand and improve students' learning experiences. However, forum messages frequently contain private information that prevents researchers from analyzing these data. We present a method for discovering and redacting private information including…

Discussion forums are used to support socio-collaborative learning processes among students in online courses. However, complex forum structures and lengthy discourse require that students spend their limited time searching and filtering through posts to find those that are relevant to them rather than spending that time engaged in other…