PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students
This addresses the issue of forum clutter and inefficiency for degree-seeking online masters students and instructors, though it is incremental as it builds on existing forum tools.
The researchers tackled the problem of duplicate posts in online education forums by introducing PARQR, a tool that monitors student questions as they are composed and suggests relevant posts, reducing duplicates by 40% and achieving a 73.5% correct recommendation rate when relevant posts exist.
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.