Measuring engagement in online collaborative learning activities: comparative analysis of the conversational framework and the social network analysis tool

In online collaborative learning, students use text-based posts to communicate with their instructor and their peers. Student's posts can be numerous, yet superficial in their content, often not addressing the objectives of the learning. Collaboration is one indicator of student engagement in an online learning task. The Conversational Framework and Social Network Analysis (SNA) pedagogical tools are used to measure the quality of collaboration. For the comparative analysis discussed in this paper, these tools were examined to identify the: purpose of each tool; the process each tool uses; and identifying what is similar or different as well as any benefits to the instructor and/or students. Each tool is diagrammatically represented. The discussion situates these tools within the benefits of measuring quality collaboration in online learning tasks. The paper concludes by identifying the need for further investigation into other tools measuring collaboration as part of the proposed PhD research. The student writer calls for collaborative advice.