Education Commons^™

Employing Social Learning Analytic Methods (Slams) To Reimagine The Social Dynamic Of Online Learning Collaborations, Damien Sanchez, Nick Flor, Charlotte Nirmalani Gunawardena

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

As online networks expand, learning collaborations will occur across disciplines, countries, and people. A particular challenge is determining the process and progress of these collaborations, and how the social dynamics of interacting groups support knowledge construction. Traditional methods that rely predominantly on content analysis of transcripts to determine social construction of knowledge are time consuming to conduct and often do not provide actionable data to improve the process before it is completed. One answer to this challenge is emerging Social Learning Analytic Methods (SLAMs) that offer robust and expedient means to analyze the performance of interacting groups online. The purpose …