the one where I finally publish my thesis

So it’s been in progress for a long time. A long, long time. It’s been nearly done for some time as well. I completed (and passed) my oral exam on Nov. 30, and had some additional revisions to make before the thing could be considered officially complete.

Now, it is. I present…

A Case Study Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Analyze Online Discussions in WordPress and Blackboard in a Graduate Course¹

That’s a mouthful. It’s actually a shorter title than I was using originally. What is it?

Abstract

Online discussions in a graduate level education course were compared using the Community of Inquiry framework and a Classroom Community survey within a mixed methods case study with concurrent triangulation of data sources. Discussion posts were published in two separate software applications: WordPress and Blackboard. Data collected included online discussion metadata, Community of Inquiry coding of online discussion content, survey responses from students, and an interview with the instructor to identify pedagogical decisions made in the design of the course. Content analysis of the discussion archives described differences in posts published to the two platforms, as well as differences in simultaneous indications of Community of Inquiry presences over time. Five new online discussion timeline visualization methods are presented. Key findings include an emphasis on pedagogical design over software selection in facilitating rich online discussions in the context of a graduate level course, although selection of software may provide signals to participants regarding the instructor’s expectations. Recommendations for reproducing similar research, identification of areas for future research, and recommendations for practice are provided.

Yeah. So, what’s that?

Basically, I did a case study of a grad-level online course at the UofC. Online discourse was done in Blackboard and WordPress. I archived the stuff posted by students who consented to participate, and then coded their posts using a template from the Community of Inquiry framework. I then crunched the coded data, mixed with the metadata about the posts themselves, and found some interesting patterns. I had to make up some new ways to visualize the online discussion data in order to describe things the way I wanted.

I went into it thinking “blogging is going to be more awesome than LMS discussions” - I was going to try to provide some data to back that up.

I got the data, but the reason for blogging being more awesome than LMS discussions, in this case study, turned out to have little to do with the technology choice itself. The biggest factor was the pedagogical design of the course - students were given assigned writing and commenting activities in WordPress, whereas Blackboard was more of an info dump for discussions about the course itself. Also, WordPress posts and comments were graded by the instructor. Blackboard discussions, not so much. Guess where students wrote longer, more thoughtful posts.

Yeah. So that happened.

But, the methodology is still interesting. And the case study makes it clear that the design of a course and pedagogical activities are crucial in setting up meaningful online discourse.

I got to do some really interesting analysis of online discussions - combining the raw metadata with coded data about the posts themselves. Lots of cool stuff going on there.

And, I discovered just how powerful Excel pivot tables are. Seriously. Most of the heavy lifting of storing, normalizing, processing and analysing the data, as well as many of the visualizations, was done all in Excel. Seriously. Likely a blog post coming up about how I did that… I used a lot of tools, but Excel was definitely the main one. Go figure. I would not have predicted that…