Visualizing Student Participation in a Collaborative Learning Environment

In the search for techniques that support participation in online communities, in this poster we present a visualization tool for a collaborative learning environment which aims at motivating students to engage in online discussions taking place during learning activities. Grounded on social comparison theory, we propose a graph-based visualization that shows communication patterns between users or teams, in a way that it can increase social awareness and enable social comparison about students’ level of contribution. This work is in its design phase, so we present the supporting hypotheses of our proposal, expecting to encourage discussion and user feedback in order to proceed with the coming step of conducting a user study over a period of several months.