Game Learning Analytics in Higher Education: IM & Forums

In today’s digital age, the way students interact and communicate in higher education settings has undergone a significant transformation. With the advent of instant messaging and online discussion forums, the landscape of student collaboration and engagement has evolved.

The article we present today delves into the realm of digital education, exploring the role of instant messaging and online discussion forums in fostering collaborative learning experiences and knowledge sharing among students.

This article has been written by Alexandre Perera Lluna, Ana Beatriz Hernández and Enric Serradell López, the latter a member of the Management & e-Learning (MeL) research group. This article was published in the Journal Education + Training in 2021.

Methodology

In a quasi-experimental study, a group of 478 online business students participated, with 267 of them utilizing online discussion forums while the remaining 211 interacted through an instant messaging application. Employing learning analytics and text mining techniques in natural language processing, researchers delved into the communication dynamics among students using each tool, aiming to assess their efficacy in facilitating learning outcomes.

Results and conclusions

The findings highlight the complementarity of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, with asynchronous tools proving to be particularly suitable for task-related communication, while synchronous tools facilitate and expedite social interactions among students.

Moreover, the study underscores the importance of considering the time of day when communication occurs, noting differences in communication patterns between the two tools. Instant messaging, often facilitated through mobile devices, showed a bias towards night messages, fostering more immediate and dispersed communication compared to online discussion forums.

Overall, these findings provide evidence-based recommendations for enhancing communication in online education and offer a deeper understanding of how different communication modalities impact learning outcomes. By leveraging learning analytics and text mining techniques, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of communication tools in shaping student learning experiences in digital educational environments.

Consult the study

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