By Allan
Jeong
Copyrights
2001-2006
jeong@
coe.fsu.edu
.
ForumManager is a Microsoft Excel program that downloads threaded discussions from Blackboard 6.x or higher when using Internet Explorer 6.x or higher . Once downloaded into Excel, users can navigate and read the threaded messages offline (see below), and use the "Count postings" and "Performance Analysis" tools to analyze each discussion and students' performance in the discussion. For example, ForumManager counts postings per student, number of threads, average length of discussion threads (view), percent of messages posted as replies, number of replies elicited by messages posted by the student, number of times the student reciprocates a reply, number of different days the student posted to the discussion, percentage of messages posted with user-specified keywords and phrases such as 'however', 'but', '?', 'if' (view). To conduct more advanced analysis and to sequentially analyze, visualize, and identify patterns in the way students exchange tagged messages and responses, download the Discussion Analysis Tool .
Program Features:
- Download a Blackboard discussion forum and its message index into MS Excel.
- Download a message text for each message listed in the message index.
- Navigate through the downloaded message index to read the message texts in Excel and offline!
- Compute number of messages posted per student. Use this to compute student participation scores and to create small weekly discussion groups that are balanced by level of student participation.
- Compute standard deviation in the average number of postings per student
- Compute the number of messages that received at least one reply
- Measure the level of student interaction by computing the percentage of messages in forum that received at least one reply.
- Measures the length of a discussion by counting number of message threads.
- Measures the width of a discussion by computing the average thread level.
- For each individual student, compute number of messages posted, number of messages posted in reply to other students, number of replies elicited by the students' messages, number of times the student reciprocated replies, and number of different days during the discussion period when the student posted a message(s) to the discussion.
- Sort students by total number of postings to determine your most active and inactive students. Use this data to assign and balance groups by participation level.
- Generate student participation reports that can be individually and automatically emailed to students.
- Harvest messages that have been labeled or tagged by the students or the instructor (e.g. ARG, CHALLENGE, EVID, EXPLAIN, etc) to review how students are contributing to the discussions.
- Display frequencies of postings across designated labels (e.g. number of arguments, evidence).
- Count number of observed two-event sequences/interactions based on labels (e.g. ARG-EVID)
- Mask all students' names with pseudo names to protect confidentiality when using the discussions to conduct research
- Ability to download discussions from WebCT
Last Updated: March 4, 2006