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Disadvantaged students increase their academic performance through collective intelligence exposure in emergency remote learning due to COVID 19

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.