Abstract
In Taiwan, the social community, Facebook has been more and more powerful ever since being launched, and it serves as if a strong magnet, attracting teachers and students to share and discuss on such platform, and also to search for films, pictures, and messages of their specific interests. Some researchers have probed into the learning interaction and efficacy of a computer programming course, and the results show that not only could the learning interactions between teachers and students enhance, but also between students themselves under this environment supported by Facebook. We propose four steps of learning analytics to study students’ behaviors and learning performances in a social community supporting computer programming course. Furthermore, our learning analytics method could decrease the time and energy consuming process, which includes collecting, correlating and organizing students’ participative patterns. A reported case, focuses on students’ engagement behaviors and its influence on students’ learning outcomes, is carried out with 43 freshmen at a university in northern Taiwan. The results show that our learning analytics method benefits students’ participative behaviors, which are related to students’ learning achievements in the computer programming course supported by social community, since students could obtain better understanding under such learning mode.
Highlights
After Facebook, a social community site, has been launched, it has become more and more powerful since many people could reach the educational purpose of creating, sharing, and discussing knowledge by using it as a multifunctional medium (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001; Sherry, Michael, & Jason, 2011)
According to past literature, we found that learning computer programming courses has become more efficient due to the social community, Facebook, since this type of medium is helpful for learning in the field of computer programming education, and so, it turns out to be a social learning space for computer programming course discussions and feedback sharing among the students
We classify the students with similar participative behavioral variables into a homogeneous group, the clustering method for learning analytics is performed on four variables, namely time spent accessing lecture materials, time spent accessing programming assignments, time spent accessing Facebook posted messages, and time spent accessing programming refinements
Summary
After Facebook, a social community site, has been launched, it has become more and more powerful since many people could reach the educational purpose of creating, sharing, and discussing knowledge by using it as a multifunctional medium (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001; Sherry, Michael, & Jason, 2011). Having the feature of being limited by neither time nor location, users can share knowledge, seek for certain answers or share the afterclass feedbacks by posting questions on such learning community anytime and anywhere. The teacher may respond to students’ questions at any time, and the students can see all the contents posted by others. This social community becomes more and more efficient for learning computer programming due to the fact that users are not restricted by a particular time or location. Since the students do not speak directly in front of their fellows in class or after class, those who are shy or introverted are able to participate in Facebook.
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