eLearning assessment through textual analysis of class discussions

Most of the elearning classes use discussion forums to support class interaction. This paper presents a novel approach that automatically assesses student class performance by analyzing knowledge density in online class messages. Class performance of students is evaluated from three perspectives: the quality of their course work, the quantity of their efforts, and the activeness of their participation; three measures - knowledge density, message length, and message count, are derived from class messages respectively. Together, they are used to calculate a performance indicator score. The experiment shows that there is a high correlation between the performance indicator scores and the actual grades assigned by instructors. The rank orders of students by the performance indicator score are highly correlated with those by the actual grades as well.