Efficient topic identification for urgent MOOC Forum posts using BERTopic and traditional topic modeling techniques

Abstract MOOC platforms provide a means of communication through forums, allowing learners to express their difficulties and challenges while studying various courses. Within these forums, some posts require urgent attention from instructors. Failing to respond promptly to these posts can contribute to higher dropout rates and lower course completion rates. While existing research primarily focuses on identifying urgent posts through various classification techniques, it has not adequately addressed the underlying reasons behind them. This research aims to delve into these reasons and assess the extent to which they vary. By understanding the root causes of urgency, instructors can effectively address these issues and provide appropriate support and solutions. BERTopic utilizes the advanced language capabilities of transformer models and represents an advanced approach in topic modeling. In this study, a comparison was conducted to evaluate the performance of BERTopic in topic modeling on MOOCs discussion forums, alongside traditional topic models such as LDA, LSI, and NMF. The experimental results revealed that the NMF and BERTopic models outperformed the other models. Specifically, the NMF model demonstrated superior performance when a lower number of topics was required, whereas the BERTopic model excelled in generating topics with higher coherence when a larger number of topics was needed.The results considering all urgent posts from the dataset were as follows: Optimal number of topics is 6 for NMF and 50 for BERTopic; coherence scores is 0.66 for NMF and 0.616 for BERTopic; and IRBO scores is 1 for both models. This highlights the BERTopic model capability to distinguish and extract diverse topics comprehensively and coherently, aiding in the identification of various reasons behind MOOC Forum posts.