Who will work together? Factors influencing autonomic group formation in an open learning environment

ABSTRACT

Different from the group formation approaches led by teachers, learners’ generative learning objectives and the independent choice of collaborative partners are important in the Internet learning environment. This study takes the cMOOC (connectivist massive open online course) 5.0 “Internet + education: dialogue between theory and practice” as a case course. Data on learners’ interactive behaviours, generative texts, and personal attributes were collected through the course platform and questionnaires. Social network analysis and natural language processing were adopted to build a variety of collaborator relationship networks, and the quadratic assignment procedure was used to reveal the impact of the social, topic and attribute relationships of learners before collaboration on the collaborative relationship. The results show that individuals with close social relations, similar topics, similar age and learning experiences before collaboration are more likely to establish collaborative relationships; among them, close social relations and close ages are the key driving factors affecting the choice of partners. In addition, topic similarity can further promote the establishment of collaborative relationships among individuals with close social relations. The findings will help community-based courses optimise partner recommendation strategies and promote collaborative problem-solving and collective knowledge creation.

KEYWORDS:

• Online community
• collaborative learning
• opportunistic collaboration
• social network
• topic similarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Research Ethics Review Committee of Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. There was no animal involved in this study.

Informed consent

Consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Learners volunteered to participate in this study, and the data was reported anonymously by researchers.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant number 62207003].

Notes on contributors

Cixiao Wang

Cixiao Wang, is a lecture at the Research Centre of Distance Education in Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include online learning, CSCL, and embodied learning.

Yaqian Xu

Yaqian Xu, is a doctoral candidate majoring in distance education at Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include connectivist learning, instructional interaction, learning analysis.