A Visualisation Dashboard for Contested Collective Intelligence Learning Analytics to Improve Sensemaking of Group Discussion

The skill to take part in and to contribute to debates is important for informal and formal learning. Especially when addressing highly complex issues, it can be difficult to support learners participating in effective group discussion, and to stay abreast of all the information collectively generated during the discussion. Technology can help with the engagement and sensemaking of such large debates, for example, it can monitor how healthy a debate is and provide indicators of participation's distribution. A special framework that aims at harnessing the intelligence of - small to very large – groups with the support of structured discourse and argumentation tools is Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI). CCI tools provide a rich source of semantic data that, if appropriately processed, can generate powerful analytics of the online discourse. This study presents a visualisation dashboard with several visual analytics that show important aspects of online debates that have been facilitated by CCI discussion tools. The dashboard was designed to improve sensemaking and participation in online debates and has been evaluated with two studies, a lab experiment and a field study in the context of two Higher Education institutes. The paper reports findings of a usability evaluation of the visualisation dashboard. The descriptive findings suggest that participants with little experience in using analytics visualisations were able to perform well on given tasks. This constitutes a promising result for the application of such visualisation technologies as discourse-centric learning analytics interfaces can help to support learners' engagement and sensemaking of complex online debates