Text Mining and Multi-Attribute Decision-Making-Based Course Improvement in Massive Open Online Courses

Abstract

As the leading platform of online education, MOOCs provide learners with rich course resources, but course designers are still faced with the challenge of how to accurately improve the quality of courses. Current research mainly focuses on learners’ emotional feedback on different course attributes, neglecting non-emotional content as well as the costs required to improve these attributes. This limitation makes it difficult for course designers to fully grasp the real needs of learners and to accurately locate the key issues in the course. To overcome the above challenges, this study proposes an MOOC improvement method based on text mining and multi-attribute decision-making. Firstly, we utilize word vectors and clustering techniques to extract course attributes that learners focus on from their comments. Secondly, with the help of some deep learning methods based on BERT, we conduct a sentiment analysis on these comments to reveal learners’ emotional tendencies and non-emotional content towards course attributes. Finally, we adopt the multi-attribute decision-making method TOPSIS to comprehensively consider the emotional score, attention, non-emotional content, and improvement costs of the attributes, providing course designers with a priority ranking for attribute improvement. We applied this method to two typical MOOC programming courses—C language and Java language. The experimental findings demonstrate that our approach effectively identifies course attributes from reviews, assesses learners’ satisfaction, attention, and cost of improvement, and ultimately generates a prioritized list of course attributes for improvement. This study provides a new approach for improving the quality of online courses and contributes to the sustainable development of online course quality.