Virtual academic conferences as learning spaces. Factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual conferences

The COVID-19 outbreak came with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how the new reality of social distancing and limited international travel will affect the organization of academic conferences. Drawing on conceptualization of academic conferences as professional learning spaces, in this study, we examine the factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual academic conferences and how such perceptions differ between participants from different research fields. The aim was to gain knowledge about factors that should be considered when designing a virtual conference. Results show satisfaction with social interaction, the extent to which presentations met participants\u27 topics of interest and the perceived importance of learning and getting an overview on the research topic to be related to the value rating. Researchers from different research fields differ significantly in their opinion about the most appropriate conference format regarding getting an overview on the research topic. For some researchers, virtual participation might be a valuable alternative to attending a conference in person. The study serves as a first attempt to understand how and for which target groups virtual conferences serve as a valuable learning event. Further research on this conference format is needed. (DIPF/Orig.

Structure matters:Adoption of structured classification approach in the context of cognitive presence classification

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Within online learning communities, receiving timely and meaningful insights into the quality of learning activities is an important part of an effective educational experience. Commonly adopted methods–such as the Community of Inquiry framework–rely on manual coding of online discussion transcripts, which is a costly and time consuming process. There are several efforts underway to enable the automated classification of online discussion messages using supervised machine learning, which would enable the real-time analysis of interactions occurring within online learning communities. This paper investigates the importance of incorporating features that utilise the structure of online discussions for the classification of “cognitive presence”–the central dimension of the Community of Inquiry framework focusing on the quality of students’ critical thinking within online learning communities. We implemented a Conditional Random Field classification solution, which incorporates structural features that may be useful in increasing classification performance over other implementations. Our approach leads to an improvement in classification accuracy of 5.8% over current existing techniques when tested on the same dataset, with a precision and recall of 0.630 and 0.504 respectively

What is the source of social capital? the association between social network position and social presence in Communities of Inquiry

It is widely accepted that the social capital of students – developed through their participation in learning communities – has a signif-icant impact on many aspects of the students ’ learning outcomes, such as academic performance, persistence, retention, program sat-isfaction and sense of community. However, the underlying social processes that contribute to the development of social capital are not well understood. By using the well-known Community of In-quiry (CoI) model of distance and online education, we looked into the nature of the underlying social processes, and how they relate to the development of the students ’ social capital. The results of our study indicate that the affective, cohesive and interactive facets of social presence significantly predict the network centrality mea-sures commonly used for measurement of social capital

Automated cognitive presence detection in online discussion transcripts

In this paper we present the results of an exploratory study that examined the use of text mining and text classification for the au-tomation of the content analysis of discussion transcripts within the context of distance education. We used Community of In-quiry (CoI) framework and focused on the content analysis of the cognitive presence construct given its central position within the CoI model. Our results demonstrate the potentials of proposed ap-proach; The developed classifier achieved 58.4 % accuracy and Co-hen’s Kappa of 0.41 for the 5-category classification task. In this paper we analyze different classification features and describe the main problems and lessons learned from the development of such a system. Furthermore, we analyzed the use of several novel classifi-cation features that are based on the specifics of cognitive presence construct and our results indicate that some of them significantly improve classification accuracy. 1

Generative AI and Learning Analytics

This editorial looks back at the Journal of Learning Analytics (JLA) in 2023 and forward to 2024. Considering the recent proliferation of large language models such as GPT4 and Bard, the first section of this editorial points to the need for robust Generative AI (GenAI) analytics, calling for consideration of how GenAI may impact learning analytics research and practice. The second section looks back over the past year, providing statistics on submissions and considering the cost of publication in an open-access journal

Social presence in massive open online courses

The capacity to foster interpersonal interactions in massive open online courses (MOOCs) has frequently been contested, particularly when learner interactions are limited to MOOC forums. The establishment of social presence-a perceived sense of somebody being present and "real"-is among the strategies to tackle the challenges of online learning and could be applied in MOOCs. Thus far, social presence in MOOCs has been under-researched. Studies that previously examined social presence in MOOCs did not account for the peculiar nature of open online learning. In contrast to the existing work, this study seeks to understand how learners perceive social presence, and the different nuances of social presence in diverse MOOC populations. In particular, we compare perceptions of social presence across the groups of learners with different patterns of forum participation in three edX MOOCs. The findings reveal substantial differences in how learners with varying forum activity perceive social presence. Perceptions of social presence also differed in courses with the varying volume of forum interaction and duration. Finally, learners with sustained forum activity generally reported higher social presence scores that included low affectivity and strong group cohesion perceptions. With this in mind, this study is significant because of the insights into brings to the current body of knowledge around social presence in MOOCs. The study's findings also raise questions about the effectiveness of transferring existing socio-constructivist constructs into the MOOC contexts.System Engineerin