Identifying Tertiary Level Educators’ Needs and Understanding of the Collaboration Process Analytics

Abstract

There is little doubt about the significant role the educators play in supporting the collaboration process through monitoring and supporting effective interactions. However, little work explores the educators' needs and understandings of the analytics generated to measure the process of collaboration in online learning settings. In this chapter, we first explain a new method of measuring the process of collaboration (CLaP) by drawing upon the collaboration cognitive load theory and utilising social network analysis. Then, we report the results of two educator workshops and a survey that investigated the educators' understanding of the collaboration process visualisations compared to more commonly used participation measures such as the number of posts and the number of views. Our results show that although educators can indeed gain more insights into the collaboration process with CLaP visualisations, they are still considered limited and too complex to be easily adopted in practice. Moreover, currently, many educators are not evaluating the collaboration process in online settings at all, or when they do, they only rely on participation measures. We conclude the chapter with a discussion on the findings and their future implications.