Revisão Sistemática da Utilização de Fóruns Inteligentes para a Promoção da Colaboração na Aprendizagem Virtual.

Online discussion forums are important to promote the exchange of ideas and the construction of collaborative knowledge in virtual learning. Thus, the active participation of its users is required to the effectiveness of the learning process, as the diversity and synergy of knowledge creates a rich base for the users and, additionally, the participants can absorb the content more deeply, in creating it. In the virtual education context, one also should consider the increasing importance of the techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as they enable the extraction of relevant information in environments which use a massive number of data, not easily tackled by traditional computation techniques. This work investigates how the scientific literature reports the use of AI to promote participation in online forums used in distance learning. We conducted a systematic review, and although we obtained a great number of results in the initial search, after a more detailed analysis, only 18 articles were considered relevant to this research. The following conclusion is that AI is still being underutilized as a solution for the problem of participation in educational forums, but if it is adequately explored, it has potential to provide an important contribution to the efficacy of this tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]