Visualizing the affective structure of students interaction

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of providing suitable feedback to teachers who coordinate learning activities in small online learning groups. The feedback comes from the learners' side, directly, as a continuous stream of information reflecting affective aspects of their communication when working on a specific learning task. Students collaborating in a group may get along with each other easily, and may be happy working with each other on the problem assigned to them. However, they may also find the collaboration on the problem very challenging, or they may find their peers inadequate to take the challenge. In all such situations, their interaction will bear important affective features that the teacher should better be aware of if she/he wants to timely intervene and coordinate the learning process efficiently. In online communication, however, the affective part of students' interaction is difficult to capture. It is also time consuming and very demanding for teachers to take it into account if there are several groups of students to monitor simultaneously. The research presented in this paper suggests using appropriate visualizations of students' affective interaction as timely and easy-to-use feedback that teachers can leverage to coordinate the learning process. The tool used for generating visualization - Synesketch - is presented in detail, and a learning scenario and appropriate visualizations are discussed as well. Synesketch is integrated with the Moodle Learning Management System and the paper assumes that the students can be coordinated in their learning activities directly or indirectly through Moodle. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.