Detecting leadership in peer-moderated online collaborative learning through text mining and social network analysis

How students emerge as learning leaders in small group online discussions

“…Official appointment as 'moderator' might motivate a student to fulfill a legitimate leadership role (Coll, France, & Taylor, 2005). Previous findings suggest that peer moderation can be an effective strategy for increasing student participation, group cohesion and group knowledge construction (Dillenbourg, Jarvela, & Fischer, 2009;Xie et al, 2018).…”

“…The three metrics are assumed to correspond to the online learner attributes, respectively: (a) popularity (how many feedback messages a learner in a group receives from other learners), (b) influence (how many feedback messages a learner in a group sends to other students) and (c) mediation (the extent to which a learner takes control of the interactions among other learners in an interaction network). These three metrics have been found to be associated with online leaner attributes, which emerge from social ties in an online discussion network (Author, 2019a;Cho, Gay, Davidson, & Ingraffea, 2007;Dado, Hecking, Bodemer, & Hoppe, 2017;Xie et al, 2018).…”

“…To facilitate learning in a social context such as collaborative online learning, leadership skills are critical to student success in digital learning environments in higher education (Van Laar, Van Deursen, Van Dijk, & De Haan, 2017). Prior literature has addressed the role of leaders in collaborative online learning from different perspectives, including leadership indicators (Xie, Di Tosto, Lu, & Cho, 2018), the effect of peer moderation ( De Wever, Van Keer, Schellens, & Valcke, 2010), the influence of emergent leaders on collaborative problem solving (Sun, Datu, Warchola, & Anderson, 2018;Sun et al, 2017) and the relationship between self-regulation and perceived leadership (Xie, Hensley, Law, & Sun, 2019).…”

“…In the context of collaborative online discussions, some students learn by actively evaluating other students' work, providing constructive commentaries and exchanging meaningful resources; other students learn by passive engagement, as well as viewing other students' posts and attached materials (Kim, Yoon, Jo, & Branch, 2018;Wise & Hsiao, 2019). Different levels of students' engagement in the online discourses enable some students to play distinct roles in the collaborative learning community (Harrer, Zeini, & Ziebarth, 2009;Kelly, Davis, Nelson, & Mendoza, 2008;Xie et al, 2018). Given that a discussion forum is a social space, a learning leader can be any student who exerts substantial influence on his or her peers during critical conversations that occur in the discussion forum.…”

Recent Contributions of Data Mining to Language Learning Research

“…However, an online discussion platform does not ensure equal participation across all students. Social network analysis has been increasingly adopted in education to examine group interactions and behavior patterns among participants (e.g., Shea et al, 2013; Sun, Lin, Wu, Zhou, & Luo 2018; Xie, Di Tosto, Lu, & Cho, 2018; Zhu, 2006). A social network is established when a group of individuals exchange information and interact with each other for the purpose of achieving certain learning goals.…”