Helping Educators Analyse Interactions within Networked Learning Communities: A Framework and the AnalyticsTool System

Networked learning is much more ambitious than previous approaches of using technology in education. It is, therefore, more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the networked learning activities. Evaluation of learners’ interactions in networked learning environments is a resource and expertise demanding task. Educators participating in networked learning communities, have very little support by integrated tools to evaluate students’ learning activities flow and identify learners’ online browsing behaviour and interactions. As a consequence, educators are in need for non-intrusive and automatic ways to become informed about learners’ progress in order to better follow their learning process and appraise the online course effectiveness. They also need specialized tools for gathering and analysing data for evaluating the learning effectiveness of networked learning instructional models. The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework and an innovative tool, called AnalyticsTool, which is based on this framework, that allow teacher and evaluator to easily track the learners’ online behaviour, make judgements about learners’ activity flow and have a better insight about the knowledge constructed and skills acquired in a networked learning environment. The innovation of the proposed tool is that interoperates with the Moodle learning management system and that it guides the educator perform the interaction analysis of collaborative learning scenarios that have been designed following specific learning strategies such as TPS, Jigsaw, Pyramid, etc.