Designing Analytics for Collaboration Literacy and Student Empowerment

Abstract

Collaboration has garnered global attention as an important skill for the 21st century. While researchers have been doing work on collaboration for nearly a century, many of the questions that the field is investigating overlook the need for students to learn how to read and respond to different collaborative settings. Existing research focuses on chronicling the various factors that predict the effectiveness of a collaborative experience, or on changing user behaviour in the moment. These are worthwhile research endeavours for developing our theoretical understanding of collaboration. However, there is also a need to centre student perceptions and experiences with collaboration as an important area of inquiry. Based on a survey of 131 university students, we find that student collaboration-related concerns can be represented across seven different categories or dimensions: Climate, Compatibility, Communication, Conflict, Context, Contribution, and Constructive. These categories extend prior research on collaboration and can help the field ensure that future collaboration analytics tools are designed to support the ways that students think about and utilize collaboration. Finally, we describe our instantiation of many of these dimensions in our collaborative analytics tool, BLINC, and suggest that these seven dimensions can be instructive for re-orienting the Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) and collaboration analytics communities.

Collaboration Analytics — Current State and Potential Futures

“…In the second article, Worsley, Anderson, Melo, and Jang (2021) talk about the importance of developing new data collection tools for supporting collaboration analytics. They present a paper describing the development of a tool called BLINC (Building Literacy in In-Person Collaboration) that was informed by data collected from university students regarding their concerns about collaboration.…”

“…Collaboration analytics is a perfect example of this -by developing new data collection tools that allow us to visualize social interactions in real time, it could allow students to better understand group interactions and how to interact with others. The BLINC platform (Worsley et al, 2021) is a first step in this direction. By providing information about the group's discussion, the tool allows students to start a conversation on how their collaborative processes could be improved.…”

Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning Together: Unmasking Power in a Students as Partners Program using Collaborative Autoethnography

“…Further, we incorporate the use of ENA and its visualisations to support our collaborative autoethnography process. This use of ENA primarily to support our reflective process (Alhadad, 2018;Worsley et al, 2021) (rather than of analysis of research findings per se) is novel. Collectively, all authors found that our collaborative reflections were enhanced using ENA as it helped us interrogate and question our assumptions and understanding of each other, and in supporting our reflexivity beyond what we were able to engage in prior to introducing the ENA in our CAE.…”

Teacher Artificial Intelligence-Supported Pedagogical Actions in Collaborative Learning Coregulation: A Wizard-of-Oz Study

“…Additionally, current research showcases an urgency for guiding systems: Molenaar and Knoop-Van Campen (2019) and Amarasinghe et al (2020) suggest that a recommendation service should be developed to existing LA systems. Correspondingly, Worsley et al (2021) specifically draw attention to the need for systems identifying problems and at the same time offering possible avenues for solving the issues. Ultimately, the focus of collaboration analytics should be on really having an impact on teaching and learning about how to collaborate better (Wise and Jung, 2019;Worsley et al, 2021).…”

“…Correspondingly, Worsley et al (2021) specifically draw attention to the need for systems identifying problems and at the same time offering possible avenues for solving the issues. Ultimately, the focus of collaboration analytics should be on really having an impact on teaching and learning about how to collaborate better (Wise and Jung, 2019;Worsley et al, 2021). Until now, what kind of pedagogical action to choose for a particular group of students has remained an untouched avenue (van Leeuwen and Rummel, 2020).…”