Implicit guidance in educational online collaboration: Supporting highly qualitative and friendly knowledge exchange processes

Abstract

Group awareness tools that implicitly guide users by presenting information about intangible cognitive (e.g., knowledge) and emotional (e.g., friendliness) group aspects have different effects in educational online collaboration. Prior research has focused on smaller group settings, with examining different tools separately or in combination without systematically disentangling their specific effects. Social media learning communities may particularly benefit from combining cognitive and emotional group awareness support, as emotional processes are closely related to cognitive processes in such settings. To systematically test this, we conducted a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment (N = 148), in which participants were provided with a wiki-like environment and, except for the control condition, dynamic cognitive (based on knowledge tests) and/or emotional (based on sentiment analysis) group awareness information. As a theoretical implication, the results provide insights into the positive effects of single cognitive group awareness information on produced content quality by highlighting different knowledge levels. Single emotional group awareness information moreover positively affects the friendliness of exchange processes, which depends on the learners’ need for affect. Neither single cognitive group awareness support nor the interaction with emotional group awareness support reveals direct positive effects on learning posttest performance. However, emotional group awareness tools have the potential to indirectly affect well-being and learning posttest performance, mediated via friendly interactions. As a practical implication, knowledge bar visualizations should be considered to improve outcome quality in social media collaboration. Besides, the use of dynamic sentiment analysis for assessing and visualizing different friendliness levels promotes discussions in a polite and respectful manner.

Keywords

• Collaborative/cooperative learning
• Distance education and online learning
• Informal learning
• Social media