Using group communication to monitor web-based group learning

In a web group-learning environment, students must communicate with other group members on the Internet to accomplish group projects and share knowledge. Communication is likely to affect performance and so analysing the relationship between communicative relationships and group performance may help teachers to monitor groups effectively. Certain tasks are necessary to perform such an analysis — recording group communication, extracting communication relationships and determining the relationship between group communication and group performance. This study developed a method for determining relationships and rules for predicting performance to enable teachers to take act appropriately according to the predicted performance of the group. Four group performance indicators are considered — average grades within a group, project grade, frequency of resource-sharing and drop-out rate. Experimental results are presented, concerning the application of the methodology to a web class of 706 students, divided into 70 groups. The experimental results show that group communication patterns significantly affect group performance.