At Eastern Washington University we've built an LTI called Threadz that is open sourse and available for anyone to install at their own institution. Threadz is a discussion visualization tool that adds graphs and statistics to Canvas discussions.
Online discussions provide valuable information about the dynamics of a course and its constituents. Much of this information is found within the content of the posts, but other elements are hidden within the social network connection and interactions between students and between students and instructors. Threadz is a tool that extracts this hidden information and puts it on display.
The visual representations created from social network connections and interactions between students and instructors in a discussion assist in identifying specific behaviors and characteristics within the course, such as: learner isolation, non-integrated groups, instructor-centric discussions, and key integration (power) users and groups. By identifying these behaviors and characteristics, the instructor can affect change in these interactions to help make the discussions and classroom discourse more accessible to all.
More information can be found on the Threadz website.
The files to the LTI can be found on github at: mcjelewis/threadz · GitHub
Matt
