Quantifying and Evaluating Student Participation and Engagement in an Academic Facebook Group

Abstract

Asynchronous online discussions offer many advantages in an educational context such as building a class community, empowering students to express themselves, facilitating exploratory learning and contributing to the development of cognitive, critical thinking and writing skills. Whether integrated within a Learning Management System or as an external website, one of the most common platforms for hosting such asynchronous online discussions is a discussion board. Recent technological advancements, however, offer a wide number of alternative tools. Among them, the ‘Groups’ feature from Facebook, currently the largest online social network, has attracted a lot of attention by the academic community and ample research demonstrates the benefits of the specific tool for educational purposes. Comparing Facebook Groups with a discussion board in terms of support for the instructor to appraise student participation and engagement reveals a drawback for Facebook Groups. While discussion boards are supported by a number of learning analytics tools, no such academic support seems to exist for a Facebook Group. In this paper we introduce InGauge, a novel educational tool that enables instructors to gauge the level of student engagement and participation within an academic Facebook group. Founded on educational theories for evaluating online engagement, InGauge can collect and analyse all activities within the group and generate a number of learning analytics reports. The most important academic feature, however, is that InGauge offers support for customizing an assessment model in order to meet the student participation requirements of any type of Facebook group that is used for educational purposes.