Coursera Forums

This repository provides the anonymized versions of the discussion threads from the forums of 60 Coursera Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for a total of about 100,000 threads. This dataset is associated to the paper:

Language independent analysis and classification of discussion threads in coursera MOOC forums, by Lorenzo A. Rossi and Omprakash Gnawali, IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI), August 2014.

According to the 2019 Google Scholar Metrics, our paper is the 2nd most cited in Information Reuse and Integration for the July 2014 - July 2019 period.

If you use the dataset for your work, please cite the paper. BiBTeX entry:

@inproceedings{coursera-iri2014,
   author = {Lorenzo A. Rossi and Omprakash Gnawali},
   title = {{Language Independent Analysis and Classification of Discussion Threads in Coursera MOOC Forums}},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI 2014)},
   month = aug,
   year = {2014}
}

If you have questions, email lorenzo [dot] rossi [at] gmail

The dataset has been anonymized as follows: the text and the names of the authors of all the posts and comments have been removed. The author indentifiers have been hashed so not to match the Coursera user indentifiers. Anonymous users have ID 0 on this repository as well as on Coursera.

Description of the CSV files

All the files are in the folder data.

course_information.csv

Basic information about the 60 courses used in this dataset.

• name course name
• course_id Coursera course identifier
• weeks course duration (in weeks)
• hours average number of hours ofcourse work requested per week
• start_date start date
• end_date end date (often not enetered in this file)
• type type of course ('Q': quantitative, ...)
• language language use to teach the course (also the main but not necessarily the only language of the forums). 'E': English, 'FR': French, 'SP': Spanish, 'CH': Chinese
• num_threads number of threads in the forum
• mandatory_posts number of posts to receive credits for activity in the forums some Coursera courses give credits for posting in the forums
• num_users number of unique users active in the forum. Anonymous users are counted as 1 unit; so the number of actual users may be larger.

course_subforums.csv

Data about the threads and the subpforums containing them for the discussion forums of the 60 courses.

• thread_id thread identifier
• course_id Coursera course identifier
• og_forum name of the original (sub)forum
• og_forum_id identifier (int) of the original subforum
• parent_forum name of the parent (sub)forum
• parent_forum_id identifier of the parent (sub)forum
• forum_chain complete sequence of (sub)forum names from root to current subforum
• depth number of (sub)forum in forum_chain
• num_views number of views for the thread
• num_tags number of tags associated to the subforum title
• forum_id possibly re-mapped subforum identifier
  • 2: General (Miscellaneous) Discussion
  • 3: Assignments
  • 4: Study Groups / Meetups
  • 7: Course Feedback / Suggestions
  • 8: Lectures
  • 9: Platform Issues
  • 100: Signature Track
  • otherwise: not remapped

course_posts.csv

Data aboout all the posts or comments (minus spam) made in the discussion forums of the 60 courses.

• post_id identifier (integer) of the post (comment)
• thread_id identifier of the thread
• course_id Coursera course identifier
• parent_id identifier of the parent post (0 for posts, nonzero for comments)
• order order of the post in the thread (1: first post, 2: ..., 0: comment)
• user_id user ID (hashed version of original Coursera user ID)
• user_type 'Student', 'Anonymous', 'Staff', 'Instructor', 'Community TA', 'Coursera Staff' or 'Coursera Tech Support'
• post_time time stamp
• relative_t normalized posting time relative to the course's start and end time
• votes sum of the votes received by the post (comment). Each user can add +/-1 to a post
• num_words (new) number of words (NA for posts in Chinese language)
• forum_id possibly re-mapped subforum identifier
  • 2: General (Miscellaneous) Discussion
  • 3: Assignments
  • 4: Study Groups / Meetups
  • 7: Course Feedback / Suggestions
  • 8: Lectures
  • 9: Platform Issues
  • 100: Signature Track
  • otherwise: not remapped