Examining Students’ Online Learning and Collaboration Using Analytics-Supported Assessment Tools and Dashboards

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of designing a learning analytical tool to assess and facilitate online collaborative learning in discussion forums. The analytics tool developed is grounded on collaboration theories to unravel students’ online collaboration, encompassing three features: (a) participation and build-on posts, (b) lexical keywords for domain understanding, and (c) communicative acts for dialogic interactions. The tool was designed to analyze students’ online discussions for two classes in a postgraduate educational studies course. Findings unravel student online collaboration behaviour, including (a) high engagement with online posts exceeding course requirements, (b) frequency/ links among keywords used (not used) indicate students’ knowledge networks and gaps, and (3) dialogic communication acts commonly employed while higher-level acts (e.g., coordination) not yet adopted. Findings also indicate student groups using a higher frequency of communication acts (more dialogic in discussion) also obtained higher grades, providing some validation. Implications suggest how the tools can be used to assess social-semantic-dialogic online collaborative behaviour and how instructors can use analytics information to adapt their instructional strategies to address students’ knowledge gaps and provide feedback. Students can also use the analytics information to regulate and improve online discussions.