Invisible participants: how cultural capital relates to lurking behavior
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
Pedagogical lurking: Student engagement in non-posting discussion behavior
Computers in Human Behavior
Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Strong regularities in online peer production
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Feedback Loops of Attention in Peer Production
CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 04
Content analysis schemes to analyze transcripts of online asynchronous discussion groups: A review
Computers & Education - Methodological issue in researching CSCL
Early detection of potential experts in question answering communities
UMAP'11 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on User modeling, adaption, and personalization
Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Contributor profiles, their dynamics, and their importance in five q&a sites
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
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Discussion forums, employed by MOOC providers as the primary mode of interaction among instructors and students, have emerged as one of the important components of online courses. We empirically study contribution behavior in these online collaborative learning forums using data from 44 MOOCs hosted on Coursera, focusing primarily on the highest-volume contributors---"superposters"---in a forum. We explore who these superposters are and study their engagement patterns across the MOOC platform, with a focus on the following question---to what extent is superposting a positive phenomenon for the forum? Specifically, while superposters clearly contribute heavily to the forum in terms of quantity, how do these contributions rate in terms of quality, and does this prolific posting behavior negatively impact contribution from the large remainder of students in the class? We analyze these questions across the courses in our dataset, and find that superposters display above-average engagement across Coursera, enrolling in more courses and obtaining better grades than the average forum participant; additionally, students who are superposters in one course are significantly more likely to be superposters in other courses they take. In terms of utility, our analysis indicates that while being neither the fastest nor the most upvoted, superposters' responses are speedier and receive more upvotes than the average forum user's posts; a manual assessment of quality on a subset of this content supports this conclusion that a large fraction of superposter contributions indeed constitute useful content. Finally, we find that superposters' prolific contribution behavior does not `drown out the silent majority'---high superposter activity correlates positively and significantly with higher overall activity and forum health, as measured by total contribution volume, higher average perceived utility in terms of received votes, and a smaller fraction of orphaned threads.