We introduce PARQR, a tool for online education forums that reduces duplicate posts by 40\% in a degree seeking online masters program at a top university. Instead of performing a standard keyword search, PARQR monitors questions as students compose them and continuously suggests relevant posts. In testing, PARQR correctly recommends a relevant post, if one exists, 73.5\% of the time. We discuss PARQR's design, initial experimental results comparing different semesters with and without PARQR, and interviews we conducted with teaching instructors regarding their experience with PARQR.
@article{arxiv.1909.02043,
title = {PARQR: Augmenting the Piazza Online Forum to Better Support Degree Seeking Online Masters Students},
author = {Noah Bilgrien and Roy Finkelberg and Chirag Tailor and India Irish and Girish Murali and Abhishek Mangal and Niklas Gustafsson and Sumedha Raman and Thad Starner and Rosa Arriaga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.02043},
year = {2019}
}