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arXiv · 1909.02043

PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

Noah Bilgrien·Roy Finkelberg·Chirag Tailor·India Irish·Girish Murali·Abhishek Mangal·Niklas Gustafsson·Sumedha Raman·Thad Starner·Rosa Arriaga
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Abstract

We introduce PARQR, a tool for online education forums that reduces duplicate posts by 40\% in a degree seeking online masters program at a top university. Instead of performing a standard keyword search, PARQR monitors questions as students compose them and continuously suggests relevant posts. In testing, PARQR correctly recommends a relevant post, if one exists, 73.5\% of the time. We discuss PARQR's design, initial experimental results comparing different semesters with and without PARQR, and interviews we conducted with teaching instructors regarding their experience with PARQR.

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Noah Bilgrien, Roy Finkelberg, Chirag Tailor, India Irish, Girish Murali, Abhishek Mangal, Niklas Gustafsson, Sumedha Raman, Thad Starner, Rosa Arriaga. 2019-09-04. PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02043

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