Sharing is Learning: Using Topic Modelling to Understand Online Comments Shared by Learners

Learners have utilised coding video tutorials to learn new programming languages or enhance their existing skillset. Past studies have focused on content creators’ perspective (e.g. motivation to produce video tutorials) or understanding the learner perspective focusing on the outcome of the learning. However, the research on the learning process focusing on learners’ sharing behaviour when and after watching the video tutorial was limited. This study aims to address this gap by analysing learners’ online comments shared on the video hosting platform to infer learning behaviour from the self-regulated learning perspective. Learners’ comments from 24 video tutorials were collected from a popular YouTube coding channel and analysed using the probabilistic topic modelling method. Ten latent topics were uncovered. The findings indicated the presence of three self-regulated learning behaviours. Interestingly, the learners’ comments comprised a high proportion of comments related to sharing of coding-related questions, suggesting that learners not only use the commenting platform to provide feedback but also as a means to seek clarification. In addition, this finding also informed the content creators on the areas to engage the learners or refine course content.