Connecting agents: Engagement and motivation in online collaboration
Introduction
A critical component of different types of Internet based education initiatives such as hybrid courses that combine face-to-face education with the use of Internet-infused technologies and massive open online courses (MOOCs), and other types of Internet based distance learning courses is the development of teaching and learning ecologies that lead to cooperative or collaborative learning scenarios. Traditionally two integrated issues arise when attempting to develop these types of effective learning contexts: (a) within group democratically based social relationships and (b) interest based, goal directed problem solving and/or project development. In discussions around Internet based education, these two aspects are often translated into social engagement, where members of a community develop sustainable, relatively stable online relationships that allows them to easily make contributions to a shared community discourse (Anderson, 2008, Garrison, 2007), and user agency, where potential participants feel motivated not only to log on to the community, but also actively seek out collaborative knowledge building and problem solving scenarios as integrated members of that community (Hakkarainen, 2009, Stahl, 2006).
Social engagement and user agency are sometimes treated as co-determinative (Salmon, 2013) and/or in a dialectical relationships (Glassman & Burbidge, 2014) in the practice of building successful online teaching/learning communities. For example Salmon and colleagues apply a five stage process in the development of e-communities starting with rudimentary forms of engagement (e.g., actually logging into the online community), moving to the development of an active online personality (e.g., development of an avatar in a Second Life learning environment), and then using the agency developed through that avatar to engage with other members of the community. For the most part however user agency and the social engagement of participants in online communities are treated as separate in the research literature.
Social engagement is often operationalized and measured through constructs such as social presence (Garrison, 2007), sociability, (Kreijns, Kirschner, & Vermeulen, 2013), and connectedness (Rovai, 2002a, Rovai, 2002b). User agency is often operationalized as motivation within an individual-outcomes perspective such as task choice, effort, and persistence (Bekele, 2010), intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations (Lee, Cheung, & Chen, 2005), or based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of behavior within a shared project context (Hakkarainen, 2009, Stahl, 2006). Few studies actually measure the relationship between user agency and social engagement. The correlation is often assumed (e.g., an advanced social space for engagement will naturally lead to participation; Kreijns et al., 2013). This paper looks specifically at the relationship between motivation to participate in an online community and the level of online social engagement of participants in that community. By examining the relationship between user social engagement and motivation, rather than assuming it, we believe we can gain greater understanding of online collaborative activity. Recognition that there is a dynamic relationship between social engagement and agency may help lead to more complex educational innovations and curricula that look to integrate the two as part of the teaching and learning processes.
Section snippets
The user agency – social engagement relationship
As an educational tool, the Internet brings the concepts of collaboration through community inter-relationships and motivation to participate in goal driven activity to the forefront for a number of reasons. First, the Internet offers the possibility for quick diffuse, distributed, non-hierarchical network structures that are key to many collaborative scenarios (Glassman & Kang, 2011). The transparent nature of network communications makes them relatively easy to study, and to manipulate.
Collaborative learning
All of the frameworks discussed in this paper share similar visions of collaboration and/or cooperation, one that we argue stems from educational theory development in the early part of the 20th century. The CoI (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007), computer supported collaborative learning (Koschmann (2002) and Open Source (Glassman, 2013) frameworks overtly acknowledge their debt to a Deweyan view of education. The more overt connectivism initiatives do not mention Dewey but arguably have strong
A note on terms
There are a number of phrases used in this paper, and in the study of Internet based activity in general, that are close in meaning but serve different purposes in understanding what it means to participate in online educational and product communities. One of the ideas central to this paper is the new types and levels of connectivity offered by the Internet. Connectivity can actually be defined in a number of ways (e.g., connectivity of ideas, connectivity of text or other media to its
Online engagement
The issue of online social engagement is both simple and complex. It can be one of the most obvious and easily studied components of any platform based initiative. Because engagement in asynchronous communities demands at least minimal levels of agency it is relatively easy to determine logging on as low level engagement (surpassing the more passive action of simply showing up for class). There are of course different levels of engagement (Glassman & Kang, 2012) that may have a variable impact
A focus on social engagement
Much of the social engagement research has focused on the ways online community contexts promote quality social interactions that increase belonging and directed participation. Garrison and Arbaugh (2007) suggest three overlapping elements of online education that lead to the development of a knowledge building community of inquiry: (a) social presence, (b) cognitive presence, and (c) teacher presence. Social presence is defined as the ability of online community members to project themselves
Assessing a connected community
How to actually define and assess an efficacious online learning community is a difficult issue for determining the quality of Internet based learning experience. There are a number of ways researchers and theorists have attempted to explore levels of effective community. The most common measurement of community development is analysis of consequence. A focus on connectivity suggests community develops as individual nodes of thinking merge together in the process of problem solving and topic
Methods
This study is part of a larger ongoing research program related to the Internet based learning initiatives. While the larger study investigates various aspects of course design and student perceptions, this study is based solely on the quantitative data relevant to the stated hypotheses.
Results
Descriptive statistics of the participants’ characteristics and study variables are presented in Table 1. The correlations between connectedness and motivation for knowledge sharing are presented in the Table 2, Table 3, for the blog-centered course and the traditionally structured course respectively. As shown in the Table 2, all the correlations between connectedness and motivation for knowledge sharing from the blog-centered course were significant. That is, the more students felt connected
Discussion
The central research questions of the study were confirmed. Recall they were:
- 1)
Is there a relationship between connectedness and motivation to participate in an online community in a hybrid, web infused class?
- 2)
Does the same relationship between connectedness and motivation to participate in an online community emerge in a more traditional class?
There was a highly significant correlation between classroom connectedness and motivation to share knowledge on the blog, but this correlation emerged only
Conclusion
As we move deeper into the Internet age online education is going to be a larger part of our lives. The ability to accomplish complex tasks—to set and achieve goals through Internet based collaborations—will only become more important in our everyday lives. The possibilities for new activities as part of distributed, though highly engaged communities are extraordinary. Transient, targeted Internet communities with high levels of collaboration among users can spur innovation and open users up to
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