Title
Group awareness increases student engagement in online collaborative writing
Abstract
Online Collaborative Writing (OCW) tools such as Google Docs provide an efficient way for students to perform collaborative writing tasks. However, when teachers include OCW in their teaching, they often report fewer positive student engagement. This paper proposes a novel OCW tool called Cooperpad, with a group awareness functionality, which continuously gathers group members' writing behavior, analyzes and visualize their engagement intensity for group members to compare their participation with that of others. Using direct observations, a post-test-only design with an experimental group (N = 72) and a control group (N = 48), we have examined whether access to Cooperpad's group awareness function showed more engagement in a group-writing task than students without access to the tool. Results of direct observation indicate that Cooperpad with the group awareness support increases students' behavioral engagement, compared with a common synchronous OCW tool (without visualization support). In addition, the results show that the quality of writing in the experiment group is significantly greater than that of the control group when performing difficult tasks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.iheduc.2018.04.001
The Internet and Higher Education
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Online collaborative writing,Student engagement and group awareness
Journal
38
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1096-7516
2
0.47
References 
Authors
12
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ming Liu113513.12
Leping Liu252.33
Li Liu363447.50