Assessing Collaborative Process in CSCL with an Intelligent Content Analysis Toolkit

Unveiling the collaborative process is of central importance in CSCL research. This paper firstly reviews the different methods to assess the collaborative process and corresponding supporting tools, and points out the existing weaknesses of such tools. Afterwards, by incorporating the domain ontology, NLP and association rules mining technologies, an integrated toolkit with comprehensive functionalities is designed and implemented to support content analysis with intelligence and visualization features. A case study is also conducted to show the functionalities of the tool. The results show that the toolkit is portable, versatile, and effective to assist researchers analyzing the discourse transcripts for enhancing our understanding of the collaborative process.