Social presence visualizer: Development of the collaboration facilitation module on CSCL

Abstract

This study aims to develop and evaluate a visualization function of CSCL that is based on social presence. This function automatically categorizes the postings from learners and visually presents social interaction following a social presence indicator. Furthermore, this function seems to enhance social presence and encourage learning behavior, such as active discussion. In order to investigate the validity of auto-categorization, the inter-rater agreement rate and the ability to predict the quality of the discussion were analyzed and compared to the human-categorized data. The results demonstrated that there are several social presence indicators that have high and low inter-rater agreement, but the categorization of the function developed in this study had more prediction power than the human-conducted categorization.