Effective online interaction - one piece of research.

Students in online learning engage in a variety of collaborative practices such as threaded discussions, wikis, chats, blog comments, etc. I have the most experience with asynchronous threaded discussions. They are easy to use, and if the number of threads is small, organizationally transparent. As a learner though, I've also seen that when there are multiple discussions occurring simultaneously, they all seem to get watered down a bit. Given that I tend to rely on discussion forums as a way to engage students, introduce content, and provide opportunities for analysis and reflection AND assess participation, it seemed a good time to delve into this topic a little deeper.

I went to PsycINFO to see what research has been reported on this topic. PsycINFO indexes everything that is published in the scholarly literature on psychology - it is beyond enormous. I limited my search to articles available through my institution's library-based access as full-text, downloadable PDFs so that I could read the actual articles, not just the abstracts.

Antonio Calvani, Antonio Fini, Marcello Molino and Maria Ranieri published a 2010 article called, Visualizing and monitoring effective interactions in online collaborative groups, in the British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 41 Number 2  Pages 213–226. Their goal was to model the effectiveness of group collaboration. They wanted to use the model in a real course to give the online tutor the means to monitor and evaluate online collaboration. They also wanted to improve Moodle's standard Forum module.

The authors address the complexities inherent in trying to describe and evaluate "group effectiveness". One of the problems is that a group can be effective - they work together well, respond in a timely manner, etc - yet mundane, nonanalytical and unreflective in their thinking. Calvani et al addressed two basic dimensions of online collaboration: participation and cohesion.

Participation was composed of several factors:

• the frequency with which individual members posted to the group
• the tendency of individuals to propose discussion material by presenting cues, ideas and hypotheses
• equal participation in all group members
• rotation of roles with the group, i.e. sometimes analytical, sometimes questioning, sometimes summarizing
• regular and constant rhythm of participation

Cohesion was expressed by:

• individuals reading each other's posts
• the depth of the discussions as measured by the number of connected responses to posts
• group discussion and analysis of the arguments and proposal made in discussion
• summarizing contributions that synthesize contributions and provide closure

Calvani et al. measured these factors in the online discussions in a course taken my master's level students. Some of the features of the enhanced Moodle discussion forum that they developed were used to collect data. More on their enhanced Moodle modle and a PDF of the original article are available here.

They created an assessment model that evaluated the group on each factor. A similar scale would look like this, with higher grades closer to 5 and lower grades closer to 1:

A chart like this would provide the instructor with a graphic picture of where a group needs help. It also highlights the need for an instructor to invest time and effort into understanding group dynamics, different levels of thinking, AND assessment. 

This is just one look at the issues around the structure and evaluation of group work in online learning, but this was a useful activity for me because it reminded me that we do not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel - there is a rich empirical literature on online learning. My goal is to read more of it, and to incorporate evidence-based teaching practices into areas like evaluation.