LA-CoI: Representation of a Community of Inquiry

Many academic programs are now being offered as online-based courses. Online-based learning has many advantages over face-to-face-learning, but also offers some challenges. Among others, online- based learning may lead to isolated learning that may severely reduce the quality of learning of students. Online-based learning frameworks therefore try to foster a cooperative atmosphere among students and teachers that supports intensive communication and cooperation as an important precondition for learning. The Community of Inquiry is such an established framework that describes how cooperative online-based learning should be organized. However, it is often difficult for teachers objectively investigating whether they were successful in building such a Community of Inquiry among their students in an online-based course. In this project, we will thus investigate whether it is possible to automatically analyze to which extent the Community of Inquiry was established in an online-based course. We will develop concepts for student dashboards and teacher dashboards that will visualize the degree of Community of Inquiry that was reached. We will also investigate whether these dashboards have an effect on student self- regulation and co-regulation and on learning in general. The projects will mostly use anonymized log- data from learning management systems to quantify the Community of Inquiry.

No additional funding sources recorded.