Unveiling the process of collaborative learning through the use of digital whiteboard historical action logs

• Main Author: FWA, Hua Leong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Digital whiteboard; Collaborative learning; Visualization; Historical action logs; Curriculum and Instruction; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7565; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8568/viewcontent/P1_C2_22_pvoa.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions to transit from face-to-face to online delivery of lessons. Precluded from meeting face-to-face in a classroom due to pandemic curbs, a digital whiteboard affords both teacher and learners to be collaborating and completing a task from home instead. In this paper, we first used a survey to assess learner’s acceptance and use of digital whiteboard. We next web-scraped and visualized historical action logs recorded by the digital whiteboarding tool to uncover the process of problem-solving between and within the teams. This is significant as social-loafing and free-riding are typically difficult to detect and prevent in collaborative learning. In addition, instructors traditionally evaluate only the product but not the process of collaborative learning as most collaborative work of learners occur outside scheduled teaching hours. From the results of the survey, we can conclude that the digital whiteboard is accepted by the learners. It also encourages collaboration and leads to higher learning motivation of learners. From the visualizations of the historical action logs, we were able to discover differing interaction and collaboration practices among the teams as well as the contributions of team members within each team (e.g. some teams exhibiting uneven effort distribution). We believe that our findings are significant as to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that uses historical action logs from digital whiteboard to gain insights into the process and evidence of collaborative learning through visualization techniques.