PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students

TL;DR

PARQR is a tool that enhances online forum support for online master's students by reducing duplicate posts through real-time suggestions, improving forum organization and student engagement.

Contribution

This paper presents PARQR, a novel real-time question suggestion system that significantly reduces duplicate posts in online education forums.

Findings

PARQR reduces duplicate posts by 40%.

PARQR correctly recommends relevant posts 73.5% of the time.

Initial experiments show positive impact on forum quality.

Abstract

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.