Measuring and Visualizing Individual Contributions in Online Collaborative Discussions

In online discussions, individual contributions directly influence group performance and the deep analysis on individual level could be used to explain what happens within groups. However, measuring individual contributions in online collaborative discussion is a complex task due to the variety of elements and factors. The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to measure individual contributions in online collaborative discussions using quantitative methods both from knowledge content and participation behaviors. Then the framework is validated by an empirical study. Moreover, we visualize the information of individual contributions to give a direct observation for teachers.