A Design for a Notification and Recommender Mobile App for Educational Online Discussion

This research presents an application design to integrate notification and recommendation systems (NARS) into online discussion forums (ODFs) on mobile devices. The integration is expected to overcome the issue of long delays in response that occurs in traditional ODFs. Notification increases participants' awareness of posts and recommendation reduces the effect of participants' information overload; as a result, the time between posts should be shortened and the pattern of the interaction should be altered. Specifically, the artifact is designed with respect to social constructivist theory as a kernel theory. In addition, the design includes an intuitive way to improve the accuracy of short-text clustering which is used to extract semantic topics from posts. Lastly, the paper describes a prototype of the design artifact.