  During the COVID-19 crisis, educational institutions worldwide shifted from
face-to-face instruction to emergency remote teaching (ERT) modalities. In this
forced and sudden transition, teachers and students did not have the
opportunity to acquire the knowledge or skills necessary for online learning
modalities implemented through a learning management system (LMS). Therefore,
undergraduate teachers tend to mainly use an LMS as an information repository
and rarely promote virtual interactions among students, thus limiting the
benefits of collective intelligence for students. We analyzed data on 7,528
undergraduate students and found that cooperative and consensus dynamics among
university students in discussion forums positively affect their final GPA,
with a steeper effect for students with low academic performance during high
school. These results hold above and beyond socioeconomic and other LMS
activity confounders. Furthermore, using natural language processing, we show
that first-year students with low academic performance during high school are
exposed to more content-intensive posts in discussion forums, leading to
significantly higher university GPAs than their low-performance peers in high
school. We expect these results to motivate higher education teachers worldwide
to promote cooperative and consensus dynamics among students using tools such
as forum discussions in their classes to reap the benefits of social learning
and collective intelligence.
