Promoting Student Community with Increased Information Visibility In Distance Education
Open Access
- Author:
- Sun, Na
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 06, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Mary Beth Rosson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jack Carroll, Committee Member
Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang, Committee Member
Kyle Peck, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Online Community
Community Building
CSCW
CSCL
Distance Learning
Visual Analytics
CMC
Education Technology - Abstract:
- With the advancement of technology, more and more degree programs are available in the form of online education. Despite its top ranking in online bachelor’s degree programs, Pennsylvania State University’s World Campus presents a variety of challenges and opportunities related to students' experiences, feelings, and operation as a “community” of learners analogous to what is experienced by resident students. Towards the vision of creating a socially integrated online environment for students to work towards their online degree, I hypothesize that increased visibility of students’ relevant information for social interaction and shared identity attributes contributes to a more cohesive “felt” community. To investigate this general hypothesis, I first studied the potential connections and information needs among online students, as well as the practices for developing social relationship from the perspectives of instructors and students. Second, I designed and carried out formative evaluations of several interactive prototypes using visualizations of student data; these were designed to enhance awareness of peers with respect to different aspects of similarity or other grounds for affinity (e.g., shared timezone or geographic location, shared educational goals). In a related effort, I developed and validated two constructs of community that could be used to assess felt community in the context of online learning context, including attention to both feelings of affinity or personal ties and beliefs about the capacities of the online community. The instruments were created to assess the impact of my design efforts at making such connections visible. Finally, working from my earlier findings I designed a new set of tools that included both a peer communication and collaboration space built in Slack Workspace WeAre! and a custom set of web visualizations that convey different facets of similarity to one's peers, which is aimed to inform and invite social interaction and to promote community feelings. I fielded this last set of designs to World Campus students, collecting a mix of self-report measures (e.g., pre- and post-usage measures; open-ended comments from tool users) and a range of activity data gathered during tool use (e.g., messages exchanged, access to the custom Web tools). Combining across these multiple forms of data, and contrasting the survey data of those who did and did join the Slack space, I identified factors that influence the adoption and use of Slack Workspace, and also investigated the effect of design interventions in promoting felt community. I discuss who was most likely to take advantage of the Slack WeAre! space, how they used it, and to what extent the custom Web tools were useful in raising awareness and promoting interaction.