Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Designing incentives for online question and answer forums
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Evolution of two-sided markets
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
Implementing optimal outcomes in social computing: a game-theoretic approach
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
A fresh look at novice programmers' performance and their teachers' expectations
Proceedings of the ITiCSE working group reports conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education-working group reports
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We present a game-theoretic model for online forums for education, where students in a class can post questions to the forum and seek responses from the instructor or other students in the class. We first show that our model predicts the anecdotally observed phenomenon that students' participation in a forum is non-monotone in the instructor's response rate to questions: if the instructor responds at too high a rate students do not respond to their peers' questions, whereas an almost-absent instructor induces very little participation from the students as well. We then investigate the optimal use of a forum for two kinds of questions--- single-answer questions and discussion-style questions--- which lead to different levels of rewards that can be meaningfully offered. We show that for discussion-style questions, the instructor can choose her response rate so that the expected rate at which the first student response is received increases linearly with the size of the class; for single-answer questions, however, the optimal expected rate of arrival of the first student response remains a constant even as class size diverges. However, this slow response rate can be remedied by mixing question\ types--- as long as there is any positive probability of a\ discussion-type question in a forum, the instructor can choose her\ response rate so that the equilibrium rate of the first response from the class diverges with the number of students in the class.