Supporting Tutoring by Improved Statistical Analysis of Discussion Forums.

Fostering collaboration among pupils in a Learning Management System is certainly a great challenge for tutors and teachers. In order to assist the instructors in this task, a possible solution might consists in a technological artefact which could support the tutoring process at different levels.\ud Unfortunately, while the research has spent a great effort to the techniques devoted to manage knowledge, less attention has been focused on making the process of creation of new knowledge – and the reflection on such process – more effective. Moreover, the concept of level of collaboration in a virtual community is hard to be descrive in terms of a formal representation suitable for a software implementation. In addition, such implementation should be computationally efficient because the available time during the interaction is limited.\ud In this research, a possible solution is pursued by isolating the most interesting phases that occur during a forum session from a collaborative standpoint and finding out the necessary conditions on their basis. Then, such empirical observation are used for implementing a software library which measures such conditions and suggests the current phase according to an internal representation of the evolution of collaboration inside a learning community. From a formal point of view, the metrics adopted are based on the statistical analysis of the language used in the messages and on the dynamics of posting of the contributes.\ud Despite the simplicity of this approach, the results obtained are encouraging because\ud the system discovers with a reasonable delay the main changes in the collaboration\ud level of the community