SUNY Online has posted their current research results here: http://www.slideshare.net/alexandrapickett/sln-research-update-2011-sln-solsummit
While skimming their work on “learning presence,” like anyone, I skipped to the last slide, where a tool called SNAPP is introduced. Here’s what SNAPP does: it analyzes Discussion (Forum in the Moodle world) posts, and creates a social network diagram. What’s that? The SN diagram shows interactions in a graph of links between students. The key points to note are the students who are disconnected, and the students who are densely connected. This will tell you where the affective and interactive aspects of discussion are either working against or supporting learning and student success. Here’s what a graph looks like:
So what you say? Well, think of checking this type of diagram based on different Discussion strategies, timings, or groupings of students. You have to read the SUNY study (see presentation link, above) to find out the correlation to student grades (they found one), but this learner presence aspect is I think important. SNAPP also lists other benefits of this type of analysis:
- identify disconnected (at risk) students;
- identify key information brokers within your class;
- identify potentially high and low performing students so you can plan interventions before you even mark their work;
- indicate the extent to which a learning community is developing in your class;
- provide you with a “before and after” snapshot of what kinds of interactions happened before and after you intervened/changed your learning activity design (useful to see what effect your changes have had on student interactions and for demonstrating reflective teaching practice e.g. through a teaching portfolio)
- allow your students to benchmark their performance without the need for marking.
If you’re interested, also visit http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing/about/index.html
