METHOD OF DETERMINING THE PARAMETER OF QUALITATIVE EVALUATION OF A WEB FORUM
Authors: Pikuliak Mykola , Kuz Mykola , Lazarovych Ihor , Kuzyk Yaroslav , Skliarov Volodymyr 
Published: November 2024

Context. The development of new types of virtual environments is an urgent task of informatisation of modern education, since such services allow enhancing the quality of educational services and contribute to a deeper assimilation of new knowledge by students. A web application proposed in this paper has been built using modern approaches to creating web pages using the .NET programming language, Bootstrap and ASP.NET MVC frameworks, Azure cloud solutions and Azure SQL databases, which has enabled the simplification of software development by distributing functions between the application modules and provided the flexibility, performance, and security necessary to work with relational data. The effectiveness of the application in the educational process has been experimentally tested using the method of determining the qualitative evaluation of the web forum usefulness parameter, which was developed by introducing an informative parameter of the discussion quality based on the h-index (sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number).
Objective. To build a mathematical model of a web forum and develop a method of determining the qualitative evaluation of the parameter of usefulness of discussions in the created web application, which would allow improving the quality of educational and scientific activities in a higher education institution.
Method. A method of determining the parameter of qualitative evaluation of a web forum using the h-index has been developed, which enabled analysing the interest in covering the trends of discussion on the forum pages and planning on its basis further work of the forum as a tool of a virtual learning environment.
Results. Based on the analysis of the results of the implementation of the web application in the educational process of the Department of Information Technologies Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, the user activity of posts has been analysed and the effectiveness of discussions of the proposed topics on the forum pages has been determined using the introduced activity parameter.
Conclusions. A mathematical model of a web forum has been built, and the application has been implemented using modern approaches to software development using an optimised MVC architecture, which enabled simplification of creating a service by distributing responsibilities between the application modules and facilitating testing and technical support of the service.
The scientific novelty of the study is the development of a method of evaluating the usefulness of discussions in a web forum by introducing a new informative quality parameter, the use of which allowed broadening the scope of existing limitations in quantitative analytics of discussions and feedbacks in popular services. Experimental studies carried out on the basis of a higher education institution have confirmed the effectiveness of the method application to improve the quality of educational services. The practical significance of the obtained results is the development of a software product as a tool of the virtual learning environment of a higher education institution.