New! My systematic mapping study on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in Software Engineering Education has now been published. It cites and summarizes the results of over a hundred publications in the field of CSCL.
Wut?
A systematic mapping study (SMS) is a secondary study that aims at classification and thematic analysis of earlier research. According to Kitchenham and Charters performing a SMS can be especially suitable if few literature reviews are available on the topic and there is a need to get a general overview of the field of interest. It can also be used to identify research gaps in the current state of research.
Paper Abstract
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has been a steady topic of research since the early 1990s, and the trend has continued to this date. The basic benefits of CSCL in the classroom have been established in many fields of education to improve especially student motivation and critical thinking. In this paper we present a systematic mapping study about the state of research of computer-supported collaborative learning in software engineering education. The mapping study examines published articles from 2003 to 2013 to find out how this field of science has progressed. Ongoing research topics in CSCL in software engineering education concern wider learning communities and the effectiveness of different collaborative approaches. We found that while the research establishes the benefits of CSCL in several different environments from local to global ones, these approaches are not always detailed and comparative enough to pinpoint which factors have enabled their success.
ggplot(top25,aes(PublicationName,PublicationTotalCitations))+geom_bar(stat="identity",fill="orange")+coord_flip()+theme(legend.position="none")+ggtitle("Most cited publication venues")+xlab("Publication venue")+ylab("Total times cited")
Figure: Some visualization code from NAILS
For the first article in my blog I’ll introduce the NAILS project. It is a collection of cloud-based tools for performing statistical and Social Network Analysis (SNA) on citation data. SNA is a new way for researchers to map large datasets and get insights from new angles by analyzing connections between articles. As the amount of publications grows on any given field, automatic tools for this sort of analysis are becoming increasingly important prior to starting research on new fields. nails also provides useful data when performing systematic mapping studies in scientific literature.
Science!
The basic design and bibliometric principles of the system have been published in a research article:
Antti Knutas, Arash Hajikhani, Juho Salminen, Jouni Ikonen, and Jari Porras. 2015. Cloud-Based Bibliometric Analysis Service for Systematic Mapping Studies. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies (CompSysTech ‘15). DOI: 10.1145/2812428.2812442
Figure: A Social Network Graph of One Online Community
Through the magic of backdating I’m able to blog about our case study on gamification! A couple years back we did a case study on applying gamified online collaboration to an introduction to programming course with the help of the Q2A platform. The case study on increasing collaborative communications with gamification had positive outcomes in increasing the students’ mutual online support. The case study paper got a pretty good reception, too, and was the 6th most downloaded article in the conference’s digital library at the time. Now we are working on our gamified platform and I hope to blog about the new system soon.
Read More
A pre-print version of the case study paper is freely available to view in ResearchGate and the full version in the ACM Digital Library.
Science!
We used social network analysis on the communication logs to examine the shape of the community in order to discover if true mutual support was established between the students. After analysing the case study results we were able to conclude that students formed the core of the community, with course staff facilitating, but not dominating the conversation. More details in the article!
Abstract
In this case study we present an approach for using gamification elements to increase online student collaboration. In the study a gamified online discussion system was added to an introduction to programming course, with the aim of motivating the students to help each other. The actions in the discussion systems were analyzed and compared with user profiles and a student survey. The system had a positive impact on the course, increasing student collaboration, reduced response times and made course communications 88% more efficient by reducing email traffic.
Figure: A Social Network Graph of One Online Community