Assessment of online participation through social network measures: A HLM approach

In this research, we bring attention to one of the largest electrical and computer engineering (ECE) online discussion forums AllAboutCircuits.com. There are close to two hundred thousand learners contributing more than a million messages to this forum for over more than a decade. The massive archives of educational data raise an important question for engineering educators: How do we assess online participation? In this work-in-progress, we propose a multilevel approach to assess online participation based on social network measures and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques. Specifically, we consider the employment of HLM to model the association between online participation and measures of social capital. Predictors of social capital are established, at both the individual and group levels, to examine the association between these predictors and learners´ participation frequencies. We discuss our choice of HLM as a modeling approach over ordinary least squares (OLS) regression methods. We then describe how data is collected from the site of study, AllAboutCircuits.com, and how the modeling approach is conceptualized and used for assessment purposes. The importance of this work lies not only on sheer participation figures - it derives from the argument that online discussion fosters productive collaborative learning and individual reflection.