Modeling and assessing social learning process with E-portfolio

Abstract

Technology plays an important role in facilitating social learning. Social media networking offers today’s youth an environment that fosters social interaction, collaborative knowledge building, and sharing of emotions and feelings. As engaging in various forms of social media is a routine activity for most college students, social media could be an efficient learning tool particularly in extra-scholastic environment. As such, embedding social media platform into learning process is considered as strategy to improve students’ engagement in the learning activities by prompting their reflection and review of each other’s work, connecting them with their classmates and teachers, documenting their learning experiences, exchanging ideas in groups, and facilitating and motivating student to construct knowledge for themselves.

This research aims to integrating social media platform into social learning and developing assessment framework to understand social learning process from cognitive, and emotional perspectives. A well-designed social media application and e-portfolio, ExpLearn, would be implemented throughout the whole process of the class. The social learning platform will motivate student to document their process of social learning, and build and share knowledge in a collaborative community that will allow teachers to track and understand individual students’ learning trajectory and assess it in a more personalized way. Through scaffolding and facilitating the learning and communication among teachers and students during, this research models and assess the social, cognitive and emotional processes of learning supported by Explearn.

Before using Explearn, a pre-questionnaire would be conducted to analyze students’ previous collaborative learning in group projects on using social platforms. When students used Explearn during the group project, their online learning behavior data and their summative assessment outcome of learning activities would be collected for data analysis through social platform. And students’ opinions on using ExpLearn and how it facilitate your collaboration among group members throughout the group project would be also collected by post-questionnaire in the end of class. Different types of analysis, including students’ group discussion, chatting massages, posts and reflections etc., would be run to understand individual and group learning processes, and learning from cognitive, social, and emotional perspectives. E.g., content analysis would be conducted on students’ writing of reflections, with coding schemes/rubrics developed from experiential and social cognitive learning theories. Correlations between student reflections and their outcomes would be analyzed; social network analysis would be analyzed on how collaboration evolved during the learning activities and if different types of group structure could be identified and how they are related to collaborative knowledge building.