Education Commons^™

Analyzing Cognitive Presence In Online Courses Using An Artificial Neural Network, Thomas Edward Mcklin

Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Dissertations

This work outlines the theoretical underpinnings, method, results, and implications for constructing a discussion list analysis tool that categorizes online, educational discussion list messages into levels of cognitive effort. Purpose The purpose of such a tool is to provide evaluative feedback to instructors who facilitate online learning, to researchers studying computer-supported collaborative learning, and to administrators interested in correlating objective measures of students’ cognitive effort with other measures of student success. This work connects computer–supported collaborative learning, content analysis, and artificial intelligence. Method Broadly, the method employed is a content analysis in which the data from the analysis is modeled …