| SPOC(Small Private Online Course)was firstly put forth by Professor Armando Fox in University of California,Berkeley,in 2013 according to his MOOC(Massive Online Open Course)teaching practice in 2012.It has ushered in the new era of online education,that is,"Post-MOOC Era".The current SPOC teaching cases are mainly targeted at such two kinds of students as university undergraduates besieged by walls and full-time students.It is a flipped classroom teaching that creates a blended learning model that integrates the classroom teaching(classroom in universities)and online teaching(lecture videos from MOOC in combination with online assessment and communication and other functions).The social interaction between online learners in SPOC forum will be conducive to the formation of individual knowledge network.These online learners are classified according to different behavioral characteristics which can be gathered from the records on their exchanges and interactions in the course forum and then an exchange and interaction network of learners can be established.The network structural features of node users can be delineated through the use of Social Network Analysis technology,which provides teachers with an efficient visible way to teaching management and enjoys great popularity in online learning analysis.In the study,the interactive data about the course forum is first of all identified and collected,which leads to the establishment and visualization of the interactive network.Then the centrality and moments of the network and community findings are analyzed.Finally,a correlation analysis is made between the centrality and course grades,video watch time,and completed tasks,based on which the interaction strategies in the forum are proposed.The interactive behaviors in SPOC forum are studied by means of Social Network Analysis in this thesis.SPOC teaching practice on C Language Programming in some university is chosen as the study subject.In the university,8 teachers including 5 associate professors and 3 lecturers are involved in the course teaching which is carried out in flipped classroom model,that is,students learn the online course by themselves and ask questions or take the exams off the line.The course lasted for 10 weeks and had 120 students including 2 teachers.81 among the 120 students were recorded for involvement in discussions.Post initiator and post replier in the course forum are regarded as the nodes of Social Network Analysis and the flowing direction when the replier answers the initiator's questions as its edge.As a result,every interaction becomes the directional edge of the social network which helps establish the interaction network of learners.Gephi,the Social Network Analysis tool,is used to obtain the socigram of the interaction network and therefore to visualize the interaction process.From the visualized interaction network,the following 7 results can be obtained.Firstly,No.TO(the teacher)lies in the most central position.It has a small node(node size stands for the interaction frequency)that indicates the small number of interactions but is connected with other nodes that interact at a high frequency,controlling the central figures in the Forum.Students for No.59,No,61,No.80,No.38,No.49,No,54,and No.58 belong to the core of the network and play leading roles in the network interaction;while students in the outermost layer belong to the margin of the network and generally interact for 1-3 times in total.Secondly,the network density is 0.167 and the average node degree is 14.434,which indicates the much more intensive interactions in SPOC forum than those in MOOC forum.Thirdly,the analysis of each student's centrality is made to find out which students are "opinion leaders" and which students are at the margin of the network.Fourthly,the community findings indicate that there are mainly 8 communities the formation of which is correlated to the close exchanges between classmates.Fifthly,the dynamic analysis of networks further shows that the leading role of the core students in the network is established in the 7th and 8th week of the course,which is mainly due to the fact that online exchanges with the teacher mainly happen at the very beginning and end of the course when offline Q&A activities exist in the flipped classroom.Sixthly,individual student's interaction frequency undergoes changes in different stages with few interacting throughout the course.Finally,correlation analysis tells that node size and centrality are significantly related to the course grades,video watch time,and completed tasks.The more frequently students interact,the higher the course grades,the more willing the students take time to watch videos,and more tasks students will complete.Corresponding to the above results about SPOC forum obtained by means of Social Network Analysis,strategies about how to carry out SPOC forum are proposed.First of all,opinion leader group shall be identified and then trained for their organizing capability.Secondly,reputation of the forum members shall be improved so as to promote the formation of the relation network.Thirdly,affective strategies shall be actively employed to create a favorable interactive atmosphere.Fourthly,a reasonable grading mechanism shall be developed to ensure the efficiency of the interactive form. |
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