It is our great pleasure to announce that our proposal: “Automated system for cognitive presence coding” by Vitomir Kovanović, Srećko Joksimović & Dragan Gašević, University of Edinburgh got awarded JISC microproject funding of £5,000 [link]. The project should be completed during the fall 2015 term and presented at JISC meeting in January 2016.

Short summary:
The problem: A widely used theoretical model that describes different dimensions of online learning is the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. The central component of the model is cognitive presence, which is associated with the development of students’ critical thinking and construction of meaning through the collaborative inquiry process. This is normally analysed post-course by surveys or manual coding – not allowing any analysis of the social learning as it unfolds.
The solution: The project will enable the use of the CoI framework for continuous monitoring of student discourse. Using text mining and text classification techniques the team will develop an automated content analysis system to label each student discussion message in accordance with CoI coding scheme. This will then provide novel visualisations and dashboards which give insights into student learning processes.