Impacts of three approaches on collaborative knowledge building, group performance, behavioural engagement, and socially shared regulation in online collaborative learning

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundOnline collaborative learning has been widely adopted in the field of education. However, learners often find it difficult to engage in collaboratively building knowledge and jointly regulating online collaborative learning.ObjectivesThe study compared the impacts of the three learning approaches on collaborative knowledge building, group performance, socially shared regulation, behavioural engagement, and cognitive load in an online collaborative learning context. The first is the automatic construction of knowledge graphs (CKG) approach, the second is the automatic analysis of topic distribution (ATD) approach, and the third one is the traditional online collaborative learning (OCL) approach without any analytic feedback.MethodsA total of 144 college students participated in a quasi‐experimental study, where 48 students learned with the CKG approach, 48 students used the ATD approach, and the remaining 48 students adopted the OCL approach.Results and ConclusionsThe findings revealed that the CKG approach could encourage collaborative knowledge building, socially shared regulation, and behavioural engagement in building knowledge better than the ATD and OCL approaches. Both the CKG and ATD approaches could better improve group performance than the OCL approach. Furthermore, the CKG approach did not increase learners' cognitive load, but the ATD approach did.ImplicationsThis study has theoretical and practical implications for utilising learning analytics in online collaborative learning. Furthermore, deep neural network models are powerful for constructing knowledge graphs and analysing topic distribution.