Collaborative Knowledge Building in Web-based Learning: Assessing the Quality of Dialogue

This paper addresses the question of how to qualify a knowledge building dialogue in web-based collaborative learning. It investigates the idea of qualifying the dialogue through grading requirements and through providing students with meta-awareness around their dialogue. We investigate and analyze the changes in quality of student interaction in three different deliveries of the course that emerge in response to three different types of instruction on expected behavior. From this we draw preliminary conclusions on the extent to which descriptions of expected behavior influence the interactive process and the quality of the interaction.