Hecking, Tobias, Irene-Angelica Chounta, and H. Ulrich Hoppe. "Investigating social and semantic user roles in MOOC discussion forums." Proceedings of the sixth international conference on learning analytics & knowledge. 2016.

This paper analyzes the social and semantic structures of discussion forums in massive open online courses (MOOCs) by examining information exchange and user roles. The study constructs a network of forum users based on information-giving relations and identifies specific user roles through connection patterns. Semantic roles are defined by users' thematic areas of inquiry and expertise. Findings reveal that social and semantic roles are only moderately interdependent, indicating that user communication patterns and interests develop concurrently to a limited extent. The paper contributes methodologically by integrating traditional blockmodelling with semantic information to better characterize participant roles.