Purpose: This study aims to report on an automatic deidentification system for labeling and obfuscating personally identifiable information (PII) in student-generated text. Design/methodology/approach: The authors evaluate the performance of their deidentification system on two data sets of student-generated text. Each data set was human-annotated…

An underlying theme of this paper is that it can be easier and more efficient to conduct valid and effective research studies in online environments than in traditional classrooms. Taking advantage of the "big data" available in an online university, we conducted a study in which a massive online database was used to predict student…

Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is critical for promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the relationship…