Final Project Progress Update
Photo courtesy of xkl.com (Source)
This week, I focused on consolidating the literature in regard to interactions in discussion forums of asynchronous courses and learning more about social network analysis methodology. Interestingly, I have found that this methodology has been used pervasively to examine the discussion forums in online learning environment, so I have a pretty good number of highly relevant literature to review.
Besides the Lowes (2007), I have found Luhrs and McAnally-Salas (2016)’s article which examined collaborative levels in asynchronous discussion forums using social network analysis approach very interesting and extremely useful as in this article they authors not only provided a good background knowledge of the social network analysis, but also explained their experiment procedure thoroughly. Thank to this article, I have gained a better understanding of the social network analysis, various characteristics and measures of a network that are commonly examined by researchers (e.g. centrality, density, etc.) as well as how these factors relate to dynamics, degree of interaction and collaboration, and engagement of the forums. The authors also proposed the “collaboration index” which was a formula based on centralization value and strongly connected components value of the network (Luhrs & McAnally-Salas, 2016) that I found very interesting and applicable.
In addition, this article also helped me come up with a list of potential topics that I could include in my literature review. Indeed, the main topics and key theories that I think are relevant and essential to mention the literature review are Constructivism (specifically Social Constructivism), Collaborative Learning Theory, Interaction Equivalency Theorem, Social Network Analysis, and last but not least the use of asynchronous discussion forums.
Regarding data collecting, as my professor suggested, I have investigated more rigorously about whether Canvas, the learning management system hosting the studied course has any available functionality to export the discussion forum data. I first checked with my supervisor who has administrator role of the system if she could see the export function on her portal, then I conducted some Google search and especially looked at the Canvas’ support forum. Surprisingly, though this functionality has been requested so many times by users in the forum since 2015, it still has not been developed yet. On a side note, Canvas does offer a way to export the data directly from its database through the APIs provided to the developers who are interested in building add-ons for Canvas or any other sort of applications that need to retrieve data from Canvas’ database. Nonetheless, this approach seems undoubtedly convoluted.
Therefore, I kept developing my own script using the Web Robots Scraper Tool that I have mentioned in the previous post. The script simply scans through the discussion forum provided to count the number of response among learners and presents the data in the form of spreadsheet which will be imported to the social network analysis software later. The script works pretty well so far. It was able to analyze the discussion forum of 21 students with about 60 posts and generate the data spreadsheet in around 10 seconds. You can see a sample of the data spreadsheet in the screenshot below.
The data spreadsheet generated by Web Robots Scraper
The next step is to import the spreadsheet to UCINET, the social network analysis software. Though the software interface is not very user-friendly, it is intuitive enough for a new user like me get up and running quickly. Below is the network generated from the aforementioned data spreadsheet in UCINET. Overall, I am very happy with the progress that I have made over the last week. This week, I will focus entirely on finishing the literature review, then I will contact Dr. Lowes (2007) who happens to be a professor at Teachers College to gain more insights into how to examine these networks fruitfully.
My first network in UCINET
References
Lowes, S., Lin, P., & Wang, Y. (2007). Studying the Effectiveness of the Discussion Forum in Online Professional Development Courses. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 6(3). Retrieved from http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/6.3.3.pdf
Luhrs, C. & McAnally-Salas, L. (2016). Collaboration Levels in Asynchronous Discussion Forums: a Social Network Analysis Approach. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 14(1), 29- 44. Retrieved from http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/14.1.3.pdf
