A Visualization Tool for Managing and Studying Online Communications

Most colleges and universities have adopted course management systems (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT). Worldwide faculty and students use them for class communications and discussions. The discussion tools provided by course management systems, while powerful, often do not offer adequate capabilities to appraise communication patterns, online behaviors, group processes, or critical thinking. This paper discusses a Web-based program that represents temporal data as maps to illustrate behaviors of online discussants. Depicting discussions in this manner may help instructors and researchers study, moderate, and/or facilitate group discussions. The paper presents the rationale for program's development and provides a review of its technical specifications.