This session is to introduce a newly developed web-application,
PartiMapper, which allows instructors to allocate students systematically and automatically into small groups in consideration of their participation behaviours revealed in discussion board.
Research has reported that systematic grouping is effective for better collaboration when students are allocated into heterogeneous groups taking account for personal profile, such as gender, languages, geographic locations, learning styles, personalities, prior course experience, grades, etc. These input variables can be used for grouping students systematically with survey questionnaires, pre-test, or academic records and some tools/web-applications are available for this method.
PartiMapper allocates individual students into groups based on group collaboration indices calculated from their participation behavior variables. Upon the assumption that participation behaviours reflect individuals’ diverse variables, we extract participation data of class discussion to allocate the students into groups. Variables entered in the algorithm of
PartiMapper are:
- Frequency: measured by number of postings
- Earliness: revealed by the date and time of postings
- Abundance: revealed by number of words in postings
Of Interest to: Online and distance education, post-secondary education, instructional designers, researchers, educational technologists, Administrators
