Engage with InGauge
Measuring Participation and Engagement within an Academic Facebook Group
Thanos Hatziapostolou
1
, Jorgo Gellci
1
and Iraklis Paraskakis
2
1
Department of Computer Science, International Faculty of the University of Sheffield, CITY College, Leontos Sofou Bldg.,
54626, Thessaloniki, Greece
2
South East European Research Centre (SEERC), International Faculty of the University of Sheffield, CITY College,
24 Proxenou Koromila, 54622, Thessaloniki, Greece
Keywords: Facebook Groups, Measuring Engagement, Student Participation, Online Discussions.
Abstract: Student engagement in online asynchronous discussions is an issue that has attracted a lot of attention by
researchers since higher participation and engagement in asynchronous online discussions is associated to
higher grades and better student achievements. While a discussion forum has long been established as a
widespread platform for hosting online discussions, recent advancements in web 2.0 technologies have
introduced new means to support such activities. Among them, ‘Facebook Groups’ has gained a keen
interest by the academic community and numerous research studies disclose the advantages of the specific
tool for educational purposes. While methods and systems for measuring participation and engagement in
online discussion forums have long been developed, no method or system that addresses this issue for
Facebook groups seems to exist. This paper introduces InGauge, a pioneering online educational system that
offers teachers the ability to gauge the level of student engagement and participation within an academic
Facebook group. InGauge is founded on educational theories for evaluating online engagement and can be
easily parameterised to meet the student participation requirements of any type of Facebook group that is
used for academic purposes.
1 INTRODUCTION
Engagement in discussion is considered a
fundamental aspect in the constructivism learning
theory, through which students can generate
knowledge and meaning based on interactions with
other learners and the environment (Li, 2000).
Having as main benefits the increased engagement
with the learning content, as well as, the
development of high-order thinking and divergent
thinking (Thomas, 2002), one can safely accept that
active engagement in discussions may contribute to
the learning process and can facilitate the overall
learning experience. Since opportunities for learners
to engage in discussion within a classroom setting is
limited due to logistical and psycho-sociological
factors (Weaver and Qi, 2005), the use of online
asynchronous discussion forums has long been
established as a common method in engaging
students in discussion beyond classroom hours. Such
tools, frequently integrated within Learning
Management Systems, can be utilized as a support
mechanism to face-to-face teaching or within an
authentic online learning setting. Realizing the
teachers’ needs for evaluating participation in online
discussions, as well as, the learners’ needs for
motivation in order to participate, a wide number of
methods and tools are being used in order to
measure participation and engagement both in terms
of quantity and quality.
Despite the success of online discussion forums,
recent advances in Web 2.0 technologies and social
networks, and most importantly, their wide adoption
by students, led teachers to seek contemporary and
more attractive ways of engaging students in online
discussions (Hurt et al., 2012). Facebook, and more
precisely its “Closed Facebook Groups” feature, is
becoming a common platform for hosting online
discussions gradually replacing old forums and
collaboration capabilities of Learning Management
Systems (Pempek et al., 2009). In fact, research
studies (DiVall and Kirwin, 2012; Mokoena, 2013)
have shown that students prefer Facebook compared
to other alternatives for hosting online discussions,
mainly because of the comfort they feel when
engaging with Facebook as a platform.
160
Hatziapostolou T., Gellci J. and Paraskakis I..
Engage with InGauge - Measuring Participation and Engagement within an Academic Facebook Group.
DOI: 10.5220/0005496801600169
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 160-169
ISBN: 978-989-758-108-3
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
In this paper we introduce InGauge, a novel
online application that addresses the issue of
measuring student engagement in academic
discussions hosted in a Facebook group. Grounded
on educational theories of measuring participation in
online discussions, the system enables instructors to
effortlessly extract and summarize all contributions
and activities of the group members and to evaluate
the levels of engagement both in terms of quantity
and quality. InGauge also empowers instructors to
configure a custom participation evaluation model
according to their respective academic requirements
for a Facebook group in order to suitably quantify
and measure the engagement level of students. Last
but not least, InGauge can provide insights on
student engagement with specific learning content
since a teacher can associate topics and issues to be
discussed in the group to specific time periods.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In
section 2 we formulate a theoretical background in
order to justify the rationale for the need of the
InGauge system. The topics examined include the
pedagogical values of asynchronous online
discussions and the use of traditional discussion
forums, the importance of measuring engagement in
online discussions and finally the use of Facebook
groups as a platform to host academic online
discussions. In section 3 we introduce InGauge. We
start by elaborating on the pedagogy and motivation
behind the system and continue to present a high
level description of the components and offered
functionality. Section 4 discusses the current state of
the system and suggests possible uses to instructors.
Finally, the last section concludes and presents
future work.
2 BACKGROUND ISSUES
Constructivism is one of the most cited and
appealing theories related to education in the recent
years (Li, 2000). According to the constructivism
theory, students are seen as active learners that
create meaning and construct knowledge through
active engagement with the conceptual content using
strategies such as talking in complement to listening,
writing in complement to reading, interaction,
problem solving and similar active learning
approaches (Jonassen et al., 1995). The classroom
setting, according to constructivism, is considered a
knowledge building community rather than a group
of isolated students that listen to the input of the
lecturer (Li, 2000) and classroom discussion, being
the most fundamental ‘active’ learning approach, is
considered to be a crucial aspect of the learning
process (Andresen, 2009). Thomas (2002) has
explored the role of internal and interactive dialogue
in knowledge construction, emphasizing the
importance of what is called the ‘conversational
model of learning’. Among the most important
benefits are increased engagement in the learning
task, elevated levels of motivation, development of
high-order learning skills and divergent thinking
(Thomas, 2002). Nevertheless, actively participating
in classroom discussions and interacting with the
instructor and peers can be challenging for a student.
While there exist many logistical or psycho-
sociological factors that negatively affect active
participation in the classroom (Weaver and Qi,
2005), two have been identified as the most
important ones to students. The first factor is lack of
participation opportunity (M. Johnson and Robson,
2008). It is easily understood that in classes with a
large number of students participation naturally
decreases, considering that giving each student the
opportunity to participate would cause time
management issues (Bonwell and Eison, 1991). The
second factor is fear of peer disapproval (Howard
and Henney, 1998). Students may fear that peers
will silently disapprove and resent their
monopolization of classroom discussion, or that they
may appear unintelligent to others, in case of
mistakes. Because, however, of the importance of
participation in discussions in the learning process,
technological solutions have been developed to
enable learners to interact and discuss even in an
asynchronous mode.
2.1 Asynchronous Online Discussions
and Their Advantages
Asynchronous online discussion environments,
frequently called discussion forums, have been used
by academics for many years. Such environments
are often integrated within online Learning
Management Systems such as Blackboard and
Moodle. Many universities have integrated
asynchronous online discussions in their course
curriculum realizing the benefits that they offer to
students for active engagement with peers and
instructors.
One of the main advantages offered by
asynchronous online discussions is that they provide
an equal opportunity for all students to engage in
conversational activities. They allow students that
need time in order to participate to have the same
possibilities with other classmates (Andresen, 2009).
They also create better possibilities for introvert or
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161
shy students to be an active part of the discussion
(Li, 2000), as well as, for non-native students who
may be reluctant to participate in classroom
discussions mainly due to linguistic problems (Webb
et al., 2004). Online discussion forums are a popular
medium for these types of students to overcome
their limitations, and at the same time, improve their
communication and writing skills (Biesenbach-
Lucas, 2003). A second important advantage of
asynchronous online discussions is that they provide
participants more time to reflect on their thoughts
before they formalize their contribution (Hammond,
2005). More time to reflect means that a student has
the opportunity to examine a topic in more depth
compared to a synchronous environment which
demands the continuous input of the participants
(Biesenbach-Lucas, 2003; Lamy and Goodfellow,
1999). Due to the elimination of time constraints the
learning process is significantly enhanced (Garrison
et al., 2001) since students are cognitively engaged
by actively constructing knowledge through
reflective explorations of ideas, conclusion drawing,
and synthesizing these conclusions in the form of
contribution to the discussion. Finally, a third very
significant advantage of online asynchronous
discussions is flexibility. They make the class
accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a
week, and allow students to engage and participate
at their own pace. This flexibility in engaging with
the course content and peers is greatly appreciated
by learners and is used extensively for presenting
their ideas as well as critically evaluate those of
others (Arend, 2009).
Due to the aforementioned advantages,
instructors are extensively integrating asynchronous
online discussions as a supplement to face-to-face
discussions of a conventional classroom setting (Wu
and Hiltz, 2004). Regarding the online platforms,
however, that host such asynchronous online
discussions, a shift is observed due to the recent
advancements of web 2.0 technologies. While online
discussion forums are still offered within Learning
Management Systems, many universities are
increasing their flexibility by promoting new
possibilities of discussion outside the classroom
through social media (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2003). In
other words, there seems to be an unequivocal
upward trend into shifting online discussions to
social networking platforms, primarily because of
the fact that such social platforms are widely used by
students.
2.2 Facebook Group:
A Platform for Hosting
Asynchronous Online Discussions
Social networking sites have become a common part
of everyday life and this effect is more common on
young adults and students (Grosseck et al., 2011).
The most popular online social network nowadays is
Facebook (Junco, 2012). Considering official data
distributed by Facebook itself, there are 1.39 billion
monthly active users on the site and more than 890
million daily active users as of February 2015
(Newsroom.fb.com, 2015). Moreover, an increasing
usage of Facebook from mobile devices is being
recorded, with more than 700 million active daily
users accessing from their mobile devices
(Newsroom.fb.com, 2015). Especially the young
adult age group seem to devote a considerable
amount of time to social networking through
Facebook, a fact that has altered the way of
communication and social interaction (LaRue, 2012)
and has also affected campus life (Jenness, 2011).
Realizing the huge popularity of Facebook and the
fact that the vast majority of students do spend a lot
of time on it, researchers and educators attempt to
take advantage of this reality and continuously seek
ways to exploit Facebook for learning and teaching
purposes. After all, a platform where students
continuously show high levels of engagement, is
believed to have the potential to promote active
learning and collaboration between students
(Selwyn, 2009) and may provide opportunities for
forming communities for educational purposes
(Pollara and Zhu, 2011). In the context of
asynchronous online discussions, the “Facebook
Group” is the feature which has the potential for
substituting the traditional online discussion forums
built inside common Learning Management
Systems, such as Blackboard or Moodle (Pempek et
al., 2009; Selwyn, 2009).
Facebook groups as an instrument to
accommodate asynchronous online discussions for
academic purposes in order to supplement traditional
face-to-face teaching has been explored by a number
of research studies such as (De Villiers, 2010; Kent,
2013; Meishar-Tal et al., 2012; Petrović et al., 2012)
with very positive outcomes. In a case study
investigating the usage of the Blackboard discussion
board compared to a Facebook Page used for
academic purposes, DiVall and Kirwin (2012)
determined that Facebook proved to be the preferred
discussion medium for the majority of students. In a
similar study by Schroeder and Greenbowe (2009), a
nearly 400% higher usage rates were observed on
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the Facebook Group, compared to WebCT
discussion board. The success of Facebook groups
over traditional forums integrated inside LMSs is
mainly related to the comfort and convenience that
students feel when using a platform which they very
frequently use in their everyday life (Findings, 2010;
Fouser, 2010). As Hurt et al. (2012) state, by
“meeting students at their place”, the likelihood that
they will be more motivated to engage with other
peers and course content is increased. Overall,
students seem to favor the use of a Facebook group
for academic purposes (De Villiers, 2010; Petrović
et al., 2012) and recognize it as a valuable medium
for hosting online discussions (Fouser, 2010;
Ractham and Firpo, 2011). They perceive it as a
dynamic learning environment that properly
supports collaborative learning processes but also as
a stimulator for participation (Meishar-Tal et al.,
2012) that can greatly increase the engagement level
of student activities (Kent, 2013).
In the aforementioned research studies, the
Facebook groups were created and administered by
instructors primarily to supplement traditional face-
to-face teaching. However, there are also examples
of students themselves creating Facebook groups in
order to have asynchronous online discussions with
classmates in a pure e-learning setting such as in
Massive Open Online Courses (Poplar, 2015).
Whether as a supplement to traditional face-to-face
teaching or used solely in an e-learning setting,
Facebook groups has the potential to increase the
participation and engagement of students compared
with traditional discussion forums.
2.3 Measuring Engagement in
Asynchronous Online Discussions
In order to actively participate in an online
discussion, students need to be motivated to do so
(Mokoena, 2013). Unarguably, within an academic
setting, an apparent form of motivation is to
formally assess the volume and quality of interaction
in online discussions as a component of a unit’s final
mark. Extensive research actually suggests that a
successful online discussion is directly related with
its assessment (Jiang and Ting, 2000; Swan et al.,
2006; Swan, 2001). In order to be able to assess
students’ online participation, it is necessary to
identify, measure and evaluate each individual
contribution of each learner in the discussion forum.
Moreover, this evaluation is essential also as a form
of feedback to students regarding their performance
in the group collaboration (Thomas, 2002).
A successful evaluation of students’ engagement
in online discussions should take under
consideration both the quantity and quality of
contributions, since a large number of posts does not
necessarily signify high levels of critical thinking or
cognitive engagement. Regarding qualitative
analysis of online discussion messages, a number of
frameworks and methods have been developed such
as the Moderators Assessment Matrix (Brace-
Govan, 2003) or Gricean cooperative principle
theory (Swan and Hall, 2007) and even data mining
techniques. Nevertheless, the overall complexity and
the time required by an instructor, to measure the
levels of cognitive engagement by looking for
specific patterns according to a set of theories, may
inhibit the wide adoption of such qualitative
appraisal techniques. On the other hand, only using
quantitative evaluation methods may yield
misleading results in terms of student engagement.
Research has shown that students tend to learn
quickly to play ‘the game of assessment’ where they
post only to get the marks, but their postings are
superficial and lack in quality and critical thinking
(Oliver and Shaw, 2003; Swan et al., 2006). In order
to overcome this problem, Swan et al., (2006)
acknowledge the reaction of other students to a
posting as a direct quality indicator, and as one of
the most important forms of qualitative evaluation.
Contributions that stimulate a lot of interaction and
responses by other students rank higher in quality
compared to contributions that fail to engage other
students (Swan et al., 2006) and, therefore,
generated interaction can be considered as a form of
automatic peer review. Furthermore, Johnson and
Johnson (1986, 1995) suggest that both the
individual, as well as, the group overall should be
evaluated. According to them, collaboration is a
complicated activity that requires both individual
and group effort. Therefore, in order to achieve
successful cooperative learning, both the group and
the individual must be assessed. A simple,
frequently used scheme is having group members
assessing contributions of their peers, who take then
an average individual grade (Swan et al., 2006).
Assessing based on the number of responses or
interaction generated can be thought as an automatic
way of receiving peer review from group peers.
Learning Management Systems which
incorporate online discussion forums usually offer
tools for measuring students’ engagement in online
discussions. Blackboard, a proprietary LMS, offers a
performance dashboard through which an instructor
can view discussion board statistics and accordingly
grade the student engagement and performance.
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Moodle, an open source LMS, offers similar
functionality with the ParticipationForum plugin but
also provides advanced insights in student
engagement through plugins like BushGrapher and
Snapp 1.5 which can visually represent discussion
forum activity and relationships. Nevertheless, as
discussed in section 2.2, the Facebook groups
feature is gaining momentum as the platform to host
asynchronous online discussions for educational
settings. A thorough research that has been carried
out revealed no system that addresses the issue of
measuring engagement in a Facebook group, even
for non-academic purposes. Therefore, to the best of
our knowledge, the InGauge system presented in this
paper is the first one to provide the ability to
evaluate student participation and engagement in
online asynchronous discussions which are hosted in
a Facebook group.
3 INGAUGE:
AN ENGAGEMENT
ANALYZER FOR ACADEMIC
FACEBOOK GROUPS
InGauge is a pioneering web-based application that
addresses the issue of measuring student
engagement within an academic Facebook group.
Grounded on educational theories regarding
measuring engagement in online discussion forums,
InGauge (main dashboard depicted in Figure 1)
offers instructors a number of ways not only to
realize and appropriately evaluate student and group
participation, but also the means to identify learning
content that may require attention.
Figure 1: InGauge main dashboard.
The following sections discuss the pedagogy and
motivation behind the InGauge system and provide a
high level description of the offered functionalities.
We also briefly discuss development and
performance issues.
3.1 Motivation and Pedagogy
A number of research studies (Jiang and Ting,
2000; Swan et al., 2006; Swan, 2001) have revealed
that successful online discussions are directly related
with the assessment of a course and that many
learners need an incentive to participate in class
discussions (Andresen, 2009). However, several
other studies (Arend, 2009; Wu and Hiltz, 2004)
support the opposite and have concluded that
although students are largely in favor of online
discussions, they prefer the contribution to be
voluntary. Whether assessed or not, research studies
(López et al., 2012; Webb et al., 2004) have shown
that participation in online asynchronous discussions
is a good predictor of students’ achievements and
final marks, and a correlation between participation
in online discussions and students’ grades has been
identified. Davies and Graff (2005) determined that
students with high marks were more actively
engaged in the unit’s discussion forum. Furthermore,
King (2001) concluded that students that had a
higher degree of participation in online discussions
submitted more complete assignments compared
with students who had a lower level of interaction. It
can thus be concluded that the ability to measure
participation and engagement in online group
discussions can assist instructors in estimating
student performance.
As already mentioned, while the Facebook
groups feature is capturing a lot of attention by
academics as a platform to host asynchronous online
discussions between learners, an extensive research
that was conducted revealed that there is no system
that provides any sort of statistics for participation in
the group. After realizing this opportunity, we
determined that academia uses Facebook groups for
online discussions in numerous intermixable ways
and with different supporting pedagogies. One
approach is to use a Facebook group to supplement
traditional face-to-face teaching. A Facebook group
can also function in a pure online learning setting as
the only means for students to collaborate and
communicate. Another variation is that a Facebook
group can be instructor initiated and administered
whereas other groups are initiated and maintained
solely by students. Finally, participation in group
discussions may be either mandatory and assessed or
voluntary and not assessed. All these alternative
approaches of using a Facebook group for academic
purposes had to be taken under consideration in
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order to provide a system that is flexible enough to
cover the various needs of instructors, as well as,
modular enough to adapt to the students’ needs.
3.2 High Level System Description –
System Features
InGauge enables instructors to extract and
summarize all students’ activities within an
academic Facebook group. An instructor must be the
administrator of the specific Facebook group in
order to have access to this data and all other
functionalities offered by InGauge. Within a
Facebook group, the four primary activities of the
group’s members that can be extracted and
summarized include making a post, making a
comment, ‘liking’ a post or a comment and finally,
‘seeing’ a post. By collecting and summarizing these
activities, a member’s participation in the group can
be effectively measured since, higher frequency of
such activities, suggest higher participation.
However, measuring this type of interactions within
a group solely represents the quantity of the
activities and cannot indicate anything about the
quality of the contributions. As research suggests
(Dringus and Ellis, 2005), one of the main indicators
of the quality of a post is the interaction that it
receives from other peers in the group. Within a
Facebook group this interaction can be measured by
extracting the comments and ‘likes’ that a post
receives. This measurement, although quantitative in
nature, evaluates the quality of a post in regards to
participation. In summary, InGauge uses six
variables overall, to measure student participation:
posts, comments and ‘likes’ that a student
contributes to the group, posts that are viewed by a
student (‘Seen’ Facebook feature) and finally,
comments and ‘likes’ that a student’s contribution
receives from peers in the group.
However, merely extracting and summing the
aforementioned six types of activities in order to
estimate student participation is not sufficient, even
if both the quantity and quality dimensions are
addressed. The reason is that, in this manner, all six
types of activities are considered equivalent, which
is clearly not the case. For example, a post or a
comment should not have the same contribution
value as a ‘like’ or a ‘seen’, since posts and
comments can be considered as active actions
whereas a ‘like’ and a ‘seen’ can be characterized as
passive ones. In a similar frame of thinking, a
student post that receives interaction (comments)
from twenty peers may be indicated to have higher
quality compared to a post that does not initiate
interaction. When comparing comments and posts, it
is evident that the difference in quality between the
two is relative and cannot be easily evaluated.
However, a post can be considered as the initial
action for contributing to the group discussion,
whereas a comment as reaction or response. From all
the above, it could be the case that a need rises for
differentiating the weight of each type of
contribution. InGauge addresses this issue by
incorporating a component called Participation
Evaluation Model. The specific evaluation model,
depicted in Figure 2, allows an instructor to
configure the individual weight for each of the six
types of activities.
Figure 2: Participation Evaluation Model.
By combining the extracted number of activities
with the weights set in the Participation Evaluation
Model, InGauge calculates a score that represents
student participation by taking into account both
qualitative and quantitative aspects. It is also worth
to note that InGauge also reports overall
participation in the group in terms of total posts,
comments, ‘likes’ and ‘views’. Additionally, the
individual and group scores can be queried for
custom time periods. Figure 3 depicts a general view
of individual and group participation scores.
Figure 3: View of participation scores.
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165
Up until this point we have tackled the issue of
measuring student participation within an academic
Facebook group. Measuring engagement is far more
complicated, and requires additional factors to be
taken under consideration. As research suggests
(Dringus and Ellis, 2005), in addition to points
collected from participation, the frequency of active
contributions is an important factor that is required
in order to evaluate the level of engagement in
comparison with peers and the group overall. For
example, a student that has scored 100 points in
participation in a period of one week, but then has
no contribution in the following two weeks, cannot
be considered to have the same engagement as a
student who has scored a total of 100 points
uniformly distributed within the duration of the three
weeks. Another factor that we suggest should be
taken under consideration and is implemented in
InGauge as an optional setting is the expected
participation performance for a specific period of
time. This factor enables an instructor to establish a
margin between satisfactory and unsatisfactory
performance for a group member in terms active
participation (making posts and comments). The
algorithm that we developed to calculate individual
and group engagement takes under consideration
four parameters:
The overall points obtained from student
participation;
The overall points obtained by all other peers
in the group for a selected time period of
interest;
The average expected number of posts and
comments per time unit set by the instructor;
The time passed since the last post or
comment of the student.
The details of the algorithm are complex and due
to space limitations, the interested reader may refer
to Gellci and Hatziapostolou (2014). We strongly
believe that InGauge not only is novel in addressing
the issue of measuring student participation and
engagement within an academic Facebook group,
but does so in ways that are firmly grounded in
educational theories regarding online discussions.
3.3 Development and Performance
Issues
InGauge is built in the Ruby language using the
Rails framework. Authentication is performed using
the OAuth open standard which requests permission
from Facebook in order to be able to access a set of
data from a user profile. The Facebook Application
Programming Interface (API), which enables third
party applications to communicate and interface
with Facebook features, is used to query the
activities of a Facebook group and extract all posts,
comments, likes etc. InGauge’s interface with the
Facebook API is not direct but for simplicity
purposes it is implemented using the Koala library
(Koala Gem website, 2015). Koala is a Ruby
wrapper for the Facebook API, and plays a great role
in simplifying the HTTP requests to Facebook. After
extracting raw data from Facebook, all calculations
are performed on the client-side using Javascript.
This decision was taken for performance reasons as
Javascript is faster than Ruby (Fabiano PS, 2011).
Having in mind the high level of complexity of the
calculations, we performed a number of tests and we
determined that Javascript allowed for considerable
difference in performance. The two main Javascript
front-end libraries that we utilize are JQuery and
Twitter Flight. Regarding storage requirements, the
MySQL database is used to store the preferences and
settings that an instructor sets for a specific
Facebook group in order to analyze the group’s level
of engagement. It is worth to note at this point that
all calculations for determining the participation
score and the engagement level are performed on
demand and results are not stored in the database.
The reason is that since students can interact with
group posts from any point of time, participation is
dynamic and can change at any point of time.
Finally, user interface components are implemented
using Twitter Bootstrap, a very popular HTML,
CSS, and Javascript open source framework
developed by Twitter.
4 DISCUSSION
InGauge was designed and developed at the authors’
institution and it is currently fully-functional and in
closed beta release. Our plan is to have an open beta
version ready by June 2015 and make it available to
the general public for beta testing purposes in order
to determine whether design changes are required.
We strongly believe in the potential of InGauge as
an educational tool and therefore, we will promote it
to high school and higher education instructors who
use Facebook groups for academic purposes, as well
as, instructors who lead Massive Open Online
Courses. The most apparent value of InGauge is that
it can easily automate the process of evaluating
student engagement in online discussions in the case
that participation in the Facebook group is assessed.
In general, when participation in a Facebook group
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needs to be evaluated, the ability to configure a
custom assessment model through the Participation
Evaluation Model described in section 3.2 can be
proven very valuable for instructors in meeting the
requirements of the use of the Facebook group or the
needs of the specific groups of students. For
instance, a Facebook group within a New Product
Development unit that is used to host a
brainstorming session for a class project should give
more emphasis on new posts as opposed to a group
that hosts an idea screening session which should
emphasize on comments. Whether participation is
assessed or not, InGauge can be proven an extremely
valuable academic tool for instructors who use
Facebook groups. The measurements that InGauge
provides in combination with the offered
configurations can help instructors to identify
problematic situations not only for participation in
the Facebook group but also for the taught material
and the course overall. For instance:
It can provide insights on student engagement
for specific topics since instructors can match
subject matters with specific periods of time.
For example, if a Facebook group is used to
supplement face-to-face teaching, a Computer
Science instructor may realize that the
engagement of the group was much higher for
the weeks that recursion was covered
compared to the two weeks that dealt with
computational complexity.
It can also easily pinpoint to an instructor at
any point of time students who demonstrate
low or no participation or students who
demonstrate passive behaviour by merely
‘liking’ posts and comments. An instructor
can then approach these students to determine
if they require any form of academic attention.
We certainly do not imply that simply by using
InGauge, student engagement within a Facebook
group will increase. Nor do we imply that Facebook
groups are better than traditional online discussion
forums. As research studies (Guldberg and
Pilkington, 2006; Mazzolini and Maddison, 2003)
indicate, simply creating the environment for the
discussion, by providing the technology and even a
main question to be discussed, is not enough to
ensure the success of an online asynchronous
discussion. Among a wide number of factors that
can influence student participation, instructor
intervention (Andresen, 2009), peer-pressure (Yang
et al., 2007) and ego motivation (Moore, 2013) have
been identified as the most important ones. InGauge
can effectively assist instructors in facilitating
student online discussions within a Facebook group
by providing measurements on participation and
engagement.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
This paper introduces InGauge, an innovative web-
based application that measures student participation
and engagement in an academic Facebook group.
Currently, to the best of our knowledge, no similar
system exists. Based on established educational
theories, the system allows for customization and
configuration of a number of parameters that enables
instructors to differentiate the quantity and quality of
student interactions in the group. It also empowers
instructors with the ability to monitor the behaviour
of individual students and the whole group over
time, thus facilitating identification of possible
problematic areas.
While the system is currently in beta release, we
are already planning a number of enhancements,
such as offering the functionality of comparing
engagement levels in different groups and providing
graphical representation of interactions between
students in the group. However, we are also very
keen in determining ways of strengthening student
participation. Currently, we are addressing the issue
of ego motivation and peer-pressure in order to
further motivate students to participate in an
academic Facebook group. We have created a
gamified approach and we are in the process of
integrating virtual achievements (badges) that will
be automatically awarded to students and posted in
the Facebook group upon reaching specific
engagement levels. In addition, we are working on
parameterizing InGauge in order to provide access to
students and enable them to view their detailed
performance in terms of participation and
engagement compared anonymously with peers and
the group. The above features will further enhance
the value of InGauge as an educational tool,
addressing student engagement for educational
Facebook groups in addition to its engagement
analysis capabilities.
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