ABSTRACT
During Covid-19, most of the university courses have been transited to distance education and online teaching. It is unfortunate but true that most of this distance teaching lacks the active participation of learners, thus failing to keep their attention throughout the teaching time. According to "Dale's Cone of Learning,” students only remember 20 percent of the lecture without the involvement of any active participation. So it has become critical to find ways to engage these distance learners actively. The online discussion forum can be utilized as the primary tool to intrigue the active engagement of the learners. Therefore, it is also necessary to measure the students' active engagement in online course discussion forums. Digitalization of the teaching process allows access to a large amount of data representing learners' behavior. Every click can be observed and analyzed, which allows automating the assessment of the learning process. This paper aims to employ an existing approach introduced by the authors in previous work to translate learner's engagement quantitatively based on their online discussion activity, which can be further utilized for assessment and understanding the interaction dynamics within the course. The discussion forum data from three cohorts of an online course on "Systematic Creativity and TRIZ basics” at LUT University, Finland, is analyzed via employing Social Network Analysis and natural language processing (NLP). Learners' engagement in the discussion forums is assessed by focusing on two main criteria: the number of meaningful words used and the centrality measure of network analysis. As a result, the assessment of 50+ students' discussion forum activity depicts a strong correlation between the meaningful words used by the students and their interaction (degree centrality and eigenvector centrality). © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.