Analysing Learner Interaction in an Adaptive Communication Tool

This paper presents an approach to analyse learner interaction, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the context of a synchronous adaptive communication tool, named ACT. The quantitative analysis aims to provide information about learners’ contributions to the dialogue and the results are presented in a graphical form. Τhe qualitative analysis aims to exploit various attributes regarding learners’ contributions and investigate their collaboration behavior in terms of collaboration indicators. The analysis focuses on (i) the cognitive skills that learner develops with respect to the learning outcomes addressed by the activity, and (ii) the behavior that learner exhibits in promoting the collaboration by initiating/stimulating and advancing the discussion. The teacher has the possibility to personalize the analysis process by defining weights to the attributes analysed denoting this way their importance with respect to the underlying activity. Indicative cases from the formative evaluation of the ACT tool illustrate and explain the proposed collaboration indicators.