Thoughts on: Digging into User Page View Data for Evidence of Student Behavior and Presence

dejonghed07
Community Champion

Presenter: Jason Abbitt

This session described a pilot study to research whether or not student page view data provides any insight into establishing a Community of Inquiry.

Although nothing conclusive was determined from the research, and page views can’t always be tracked via mobile, the pilot study provided ideas for further research.

  • The 34-item standard CoI survey was completed by students at midterm
  • Acronyms/codes for presences were set up as

SP=social presence

TP=teacher presence

CP=cognitive presence

  • Surveys were downloaded to an SPSS data file and Page Views downloaded from Canvas.
  • CoI-related student actions were categorized (example: Discussion Posts were categorized as SP). However, later analysis found that one instructor created discussions that were just for posting assignments instead of engaging in discussions.

I think it’s a great idea to use available data to research establishing a CoI in online courses. When I look at the Canvas default data reports, I wonder if attaching Outcomes to rubric criteria that are categorized as CoI-related will make it easier (and more accurate than page views) to collect, download, analyze and compare the data to survey responses?: https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/CanvasDefaultAccountReports.pdf

Another possibility is to somehow connect CoI tracking to LTI and use the LTI data Report. For example, the instructor interested in researching student interaction with video could use LTI for the video (Maybe the new ARC LTI!)