Predicting User Satisfaction in Online Education Platforms: A Large Language Model Based Multi-Modal Review Mining Framework

Abstract

Online education platforms have experienced explosive growth over the past decade, generating massive volumes of user-generated content in the form of reviews, ratings, and behavioral logs. These heterogeneous signals provide unprecedented opportunities for understanding learner satisfaction, which is a critical determinant of course retention, engagement, and long-term learning outcomes. However, accurately predicting satisfaction remains challenging due to the short length, noise, contextual dependency, and multi-dimensional nature of online reviews. In this paper, we propose a unified \textbf{Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-modal framework} for predicting both platform-level and course-level learner satisfaction. The proposed framework integrates three complementary information sources: (1) short-text topic distributions that capture latent thematic structures, (2) contextualized sentiment representations learned from pretrained Transformer-based language models, and (3) behavioral interaction features derived from learner activity logs. These heterogeneous representations are fused within a hybrid regression architecture to produce accurate satisfaction predictions. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale MOOC review datasets collected from multiple public platforms. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LLM-based multi-modal framework consistently outperforms traditional text-only models, shallow sentiment baselines, and single-modality regression approaches. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the necessity of jointly modeling topic semantics, deep sentiment representations, and behavioral analytics. Our findings highlight the critical role of large-scale contextual language representations in advancing learning analytics and provide actionable insights for platform design, course improvement, and personalized recommendation.