Designing Analytics for Collaboration Literacy and Student Empowerment

Collaboration has garnered global attention as an important skill for the 21st century. While researchers have been doing work on collaboration for nearly a century, many of the questions that the field is investigating overlook the need for students to learn how to read and respond to different collaborative settings. Existing research focuses on chronicling the various factors that predict the effectiveness of a collaborative experience, or on changing user behaviour in the moment. These are worthwhile research endeavours for developing our theoretical understanding of collaboration. However, there is also a need to centre student perceptions and experiences with collaboration as an important area of inquiry. Based on a survey of 131 university students, we find that student collaboration-related concerns can be represented across seven different categories or dimensions: Climate, Compatibility, Communication, Conflict, Context, Contribution, and Constructive. These categories extend prior research on collaboration and can help the field ensure that future collaboration analytics tools are designed to support the ways that students think about and utilize collaboration. Finally, we describe our instantiation of many of these dimensions in our collaborative analytics tool, BLINC, and suggest that these seven dimensions can be instructive for re-orienting the Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) and collaboration analytics communities.