University of Maryland / Human Computer Interaction Lab & P2PU Research Study/Partnership

Team:
  * June Ahn JA (online learning, iSchool and education school)
  * Brian Butler BB (online communities / business school and iSchool)
  * Cindy Weng CW (Research assistant)
  * Philipp Schmidt PS
  * P2PU Learning Lead TBD

Background
  * We know June from writing an NSF proposal together / does very interesting work that connects to many aspects of P2PU
  * Shared example data from the course dashboard with him
  * June did a review of P2PU data and thinks there are interesting questions that we could try to answer.

Potential Research Questions to Explore
  * What factors motivate learners' participation/contribution to P2PU courses? (characteristics of the course design? other group contributions? individual history or characteristics?)
  * How do participation patterns (e.g. members taking more than one course) relate to future participation/contribution?
  * From Philipp/P2PU - we have anecdotal evidence that participation in courses drops off after 2-3 weeks, is this the case, and why?  What could we understand about this phenomena?
  * Can we link members' participation in P2PU with measures of 21st Century Literacy Skills?  e.g. Does participating in a peer to peer learning environment foster new literacy skills? (Learning analytics matched to 21st century literacy skills, need to develop a survey instrument and run periodically and track development over time)
  * Are they interested in researching the badges component? Assessment approaches? (Dirk)
    * Not specifically at the moment - but could tie into 21st century skills yep, cool!
    * Yes, we would be interested in data about challenges and badges!  They may be important factors in explaining participation (June)

Data Needed:
  * Log data that goes beyond the learning dashboard
    * Please be more specific (PS)

• a paper we read in the researcher's homestead last week mentioned CANS: Context-aware Activity Notification System
  • http://cansaware.com/
  • not obvious how easy it would be to use it with p2pu

Data sharing / Anonymization

  * What's the most efficient process for working together on getting data out of the system?
    * Manual data extraction not really an option
    * Could be an automated weekly dump that UoM can download
    * Or we expand the course dashboard to include missing variables
      * Would require us to give "admin" rights to UoM researcher or design a batch process that auto-generates dashboard export files for a set of courses
  * What's the process of anonymizing the data? 
    * CW could help with anonymizing data / data dumps


Privacy

  * If UoM handles data it will need to follow UoM IRB standards (which should take care of the privacy concerns)
  * Only if P2PU does all of the data work then UoM is exempt from IRB requirements


Open sharing of our research findings

Options: 
  * Open Access Journals
  * HCI group at UoM self-publishes all research before submitting to journals / conferences on our HCIL website
  * June self-archives all of his publications


Next steps:

  * June to draft an IRB application and MoU and send IRB guidelines
  * Philipp to speak to Delia about a MoU
  * Philipp to talk to Dirk/ Zuzel about (1) sharing a DB Dump so UoM can analyze DB structure / write an anonymization script
  * PS and JA to investigate expanding the dashboard as an alternative solution
  * P2PU has a community call on Thursdays 11 EST.  Philipp might coordinate our team joining the call to discuss with P2PU folks
    * Tentative date -> May 10th