Teachers' support using interaction analysis and visualization tools in educational group blogging

Abstract

Blogging is quite popular and group blogging has interesting potential for collaborative learning. This paper investigates the possibility of implementing Interaction Analysis techniques in educational group-blogging systems, as a tool for supporting teachers especially for engineering education. The main objective of the pilot study is to provide evidence that teachers could be facilitated, in the process of evaluating and assessing students' interaction and participation, through an Interaction Analysis plugin developed for the WordPress blogging platform. Overall, preliminary findings indicate that the prototype WordPress plugin and its integrated Interaction Analysis indicators, described in this paper, can significantly assist teachers in evaluating collaborative learning activities under the scope of engineering education.

Motivate Online Users by Moderating and Providing Tasty Testing Experiences

“…Test users and system administrator access the PATIO via web browsers with digital devices, such as mobile As the CMS based on MySQL and PHP, Wordpress is a well-known open source platform with the primary function of blogging, and the powerful plugins to build up the social media kind of online user community. [23] This is also one of the main reasons why Wordpress was chosen as the framework of PATIO service. Based on the standard Wordpress package, plugins are either directly adopted or modified, with the customized theme and extra own developed functionalities, in order to match best with the requirements of the living lab system.…”

Analysis and visualization of learning interactions in collaborative web environments

“…The GIANT IA toolkit was designed to be able to support students by raising their level of awareness with respect to their own activity, and overall behavior, as well as to the behavior of their partners, by helping them in self-reflection, and by actuating internal, metacognitive processes, which may eventually lead to selfregulation (Michailidis & Tsiatsos, 2014;Michailidis, Kapravelos & Tsiatsos, 2018;. This IA tool also supports the teacher-researcher in orchestrating, regulating, evaluating and eventually, modifying their educational strategy to meet the needs of a student group (Michailidis et al, 2013;Michailidis, Kaiafas & Tsiatsos, 2017). Against this background, this dissertation focuses mainly on the perspective of both teachers and students, and presents eight (8) research case studies evaluating the impact of the GIANT toolkit on blog-based collaborative learning environments in education.…”

“…Addressing some of the aforementioned issues, and for the research purposes of this dissertation, its author has designed an IA toolkit for blogs called GIANT (Graphical Interaction Analysis Tool). The requirements for GIANT have been selected through literature analysis and relevant research (Michailidis et al, 2013;, Michailidis & Tsiatsos, 2014, as well as by consultingon an informal basiswith students and teachers of the Informatics Department of Aristotle University (AUTH) of Thessaloniki. Figure 5.1 illustrates the custom logo designed for the GIANT toolkit.…”

“…Moreover, the preliminary version of the GIANT Activity Evaluation IA indicator, assessing student contribution in a blog-based collaborative learning activity was also tested, in an effort to evaluate the reliability of the GIANT automated grading results using the proof-of-concept method. Part of this research case study was published in the proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON 2013), (Michailidis et al, 2013). Thus, the research questions of this study, from a student's point of view, are as follow:…”

“…The study focuses only on the perspective of the students, and examines the hypothesis that educational blogging environments powered by the GIANT toolkit could enhance and improve the overall student learning attitude and collaboration during collaborative activities. Another goal of this study is to advance the work of the first pilot case study (Michailidis et al, 2013), by providing further evaluation data regarding the usability of the visualized GIANT IA indicators, in terms of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user interface satisfaction.…”