Alyssa Friend Wise

The Effects of Teacher Social Presence on Student Satisfaction, Engagement, and Learning.

This research experimentally manipulated the social presence cues in instructors messages to students. The context was an online professional development one-credit course with one-to-one mentoring of students. Additionally, student learning intentions and levels of trust were examined as factors that may mitigate the effects of social presence. Results indicate that social presence affects the learners interactions and perception of the instructor but has no effect on perceived learning, satisfaction, engagement, or the quality of their final course product. These findings suggest social presence is a correlational rather than a causal variable associated with student learning. Exploratory analyses suggest that trust and learning intentions are potentially important factors impacting student perceptions of the learning environment and performance in the course respectively.

Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Knowledge Construction in a Role-Based Online Discussion

This paper introduces an approach to analyzing temporal patterns of knowledge construction (KC) in online discussions, including consequences of role assignments. The paper illustrates the power of this approach for illuminating collaborative processes using data from a semester-long series of discussions in which 21 university students were assigned weekly roles. The KC contributions of all 252 posts in the discussion were coded using a five phase scheme (Gunawardena et al. 1997). Then, statistical discourse analysis was applied to identify segments of discussion characterized by particular aspects of KC, and “pivotal posts”—those posts which initiated new segments of discussion. Finally, the influences of assigned student roles on pivotal posts and KC were modeled. The results indicate that most online discussions had a single pivotal post separating the discussion into two distinct segments: the first dominated by a lower KC phase; the second dominated by a higher KC phase. This provides empirical evidence supporting the progressive nature of the KC process, but not the necessity of the full five-phase sequence. The pivotal posts that initiated later segments were often contributed mid-discussion by students playing one of two summarizing roles (Synthesizer and Wrapper). This suggests that assigning a summarizing role mid-discussion can aid group progress to more advanced phases of KC. Finally, in some discussion segments, the KC phase of a post was related to characteristics of the two preceding posts. Collectively, the results demonstrate the power of this temporal approach for investigating interdependencies in collaborative KC in online discussions.

Designing pedagogical interventions to support student use of learning analytics

This article addresses a relatively unexplored area in the emerging field of learning analytics, the design of learning analytics interventions. A learning analytics intervention is defined as the surrounding frame of activity through which analytic tools, data, and reports are taken up and used. It is a soft technology that involves the orchestration of the human process of engaging with the analytics as part of the larger teaching and learning activity. This paper first makes the case for the overall importance of intervention design, situating it within the larger landscape of the learning analytics field, and then considers the specific issues of intervention design for student use of learning analytics. Four principles of pedagogical learning analytics intervention design that can be used by teachers and course developers to support the productive use of learning analytics by students are introduced: Integration, Agency, Reference Frame and Dialogue. In addition three core processes in which to engage students are described: Grounding, Goal-Setting and Reflection. These principles and processes are united in a preliminary model of pedagogical learning analytics intervention design for students, presented as a starting point for further inquiry.

Learning analytics for online discussions: a pedagogical model for intervention with embedded and extracted analytics

This paper describes an application of learning analytics that builds on an existing research program investigating how students contribute and attend to the messages of others in online discussions. A pedagogical model that translates the concepts and findings of the research program into guidelines for practice and analytics with which students and instructors can assess their discussion participation are presented. The analytics are both embedded in the learning environment and extracted from it, allowing for integrated and reflective metacognitive activity. The pedagogical intervention is based on the principles of (1) Integration (2) Diversity (of Metrics) (3) Agency (4) Reflection (5) Parity and (6) Dialogue. Details of an initial implementation of this approach and preliminary findings are described. Initial results strongly support the value of student-teacher dialogue around the analytics. In contrast, instructor parity in analytics use did not seem as important to students as was expected. Analytics were reported as useful in validating invisible discussion activity, but at times triggered emotionally-charged responses.

Getting Down to Details: Using Theories of Cognition and Learning to Inform Tangible User Interface Design

Many researchers have suggested that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have potential for supporting learning. However, the theories used to explain possible effects are often invoked at a very broad level without explication of specific mechanisms by which the affordances of TUIs may be important for learning processes. Equally problematic, we lack theoretically grounded guidance for TUI designers as to what design choices might have significant impacts on learning and how to make informed choices in this regard. In this paper, we build on previous efforts to address the need for a structure to think about TUI design for learning by constructing the Tangible Learning Design Framework. We first compile a taxonomy of five elements for thinking about the relationships between TUI features, interactions and learning.We then briefly review cognitive, constructivist, embodied, distributed and social perspectives on cognition and learning and match specific theories to the key elements in the taxonomy to determine guidelines for design. In each case, we provide examples from previous work to explicate our guidelines; where empirical work is lacking, we suggest avenues for further research. Together, the taxonomy and guidelines constitute the Tangible Learning Design Framework. The framework advances thinking in the area by highlighting decisions in TUI design important for learning, providing initial guidance for thinking about these decisions through the lenses of theories of cognition and learning, and generating a blueprint for research on testable mechanisms of action by which TUI design can affect learning.

Towards Utopia: designing tangibles for learning

We describe a tangible user interface-based learning environment for children called Towards Utopia. The environment was designed to enable children, aged seven to ten, to actively construct knowledge around concepts related to land use planning and sustainable development in their community. We use Towards Utopia as a research prototype to investigate how and why tangible users interfaces can be designed to support, augment, or constrain learning opportunities. We follow a design-oriented research approach that includes a theoretically grounded analysis of design features of Towards Utopia to understand how and why design choices influence the kinds of learning opportunities created. We also describe the results of our empirical evaluation of learning outcomes in order to validate the effectiveness of our design. We conclude with general guidelines for the design of tangibles for learning.

Connecting online learners with diverse local practices: the design of effective common reference points for conversation

This mixed‐methods study probed the effectiveness of three kinds of objects (video, theory, metaphor) as common reference points for conversations between online learners (student teachers). Individuals’ degree of detail‐focus was examined as a potentially interacting covariate and the outcome measure was learners’ level of tacit knowledge related to their practice (teaching). Analysis was conducted using hierarchical linear modeling and significant results were followed up with a qualitative theme analysis. An interaction between reference point type and detail‐focus was found, demonstrating a positive effect of detail‐focus within the metaphor condition. Unexpectedly, some participants interpreted the metaphors in ways other than those intended, leading to differences in the kinds of understandings developed. The study indicated that a conceptual frame is an important characteristic of a reference point that will be truly taken in common, and that metaphors need additional framing to be viable in this role. Implications for online learning conversation design are discussed.

A Survey of Factors Contributing to Learners' "Listening" Behaviors in Asynchronous Online Discussions.

Sixty-seven undergraduates taking either a Blended Business Course (BBC) or an Online Education Course (OEC) were surveyed about factors influencing their “listening” behaviors in asynchronous online course discussions. These are the ways they attend to the posts made by others: which posts they open, how they engage with open posts, and which posts they choose to respond to. Goal-orientations were also assessed. Results indicate that student decisions about which posts to open relied strongly on discussion reply-structure and message timing; authorship was important only to BBC students. Once open, OEC students often scanned posts to decide whether to read in-depth. In the BBC, similar triage strategies were used by work-avoidant students, while mastery students read posts thoroughly. In deciding which posts to reply to, BBC students favored posts that agreed with them while OEC students favored those that disagreed. Course and student characteristics that may account for these differences are discussed and implications for research and practice are presented.

Bringing order to chaos in MOOC discussion forums with content-related thread identification

This study addresses the issues of overload and chaos in MOOC discussion forums by developing a model to categorize and identify threads based on whether or not they are substantially related to the course content. Content-related posts were defined as those that give/seek help for the learning of course material and share/comment on relevant resources. A linguistic model was built based on manually-coded starting posts in threads from a statistics MOOC (n=837) and tested on thread starting posts from the second offering of the same course (n=304) and a different statistics course (n=298). The number of views and votes threads received were tested to see if they helped classification. Results showed that content-related posts in the statistics MOOC had distinct linguistic features which appeared to be unrelated to the subject-matter domain; the linguistic model demonstrated good cross-course reliability (all recall and precision > .77) and was useful across all time segments of the courses; number of views and votes were not helpful for classification.

Identifying Content-Related Threads in MOOC Discussion Forums

This study investigated the extent to which students asked and instructors answered content-related questions in MOOC discussion forums; subsequently a classification model was built to identify such questions based on extracted linguistic features. Results showed content-related threads were a minority and under-addressed by instructors. However, linguistic modeling was promising in identifying them with high reliability.