CAMBIO DE REDES CONVENCIONALES POR REDES PREENSAMBLADAS:

Inquiry-based learning, as it has been pointed out before, requires a diversity of partic- ipatory strategies from students with a minimum guidance to ensure social interde- pendence and the desired interactions among students (D. W. Johnson & Johnson, 2009), knowledge building situations (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006) and the desired level of learners’ agency in learning. Dillenbourg suggested embedding roles within tasks to complement knowledge creation and support conflicting viewpoints (Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye, & O’Malley, 1995).

The special issue on roles (Strijbos & Weinberger, 2010), which characterized roles in online learning communities, defined roles as stated functions or responsibilities that guide individual behaviour. They can promote individual responsibility and group cohesion (Hare, 1994), increase group awareness (Mudrack & Farrell, 1995; Strijbos, Martens, Jochems, & Broers, 2004) and help to attain a shared goal. From the literature several perspectives regarding roles in CSCL, for instance, Strijbos & De Laat (2010) synthesized the role construct in terms of a micro, meso and macro level. The first type comprises roles as a task (micro-level), in which the students focus on specific activities related to the product or to the process. The second type covers the role as a pattern (meso-level), in which the students focus on multiple tasks related to the pro- cess, product or a combination. The last type is called role as a stance, it is a role de- fined by the student’s attitude towards the task. Another perspective of roles divided them into emerging and scripted types (Strijbos & Weinberger, 2010). The main differ- ence here is that emerging roles are spontaneous and identified after the collaboration, and the scripted ones are deliberately designed and assigned in advanced.

In a community of inquiry, experts have strategies that help them on how to per- form in order to succeed, but novice leaners need to be supported on how the division of labour and the socio-cognitive instances must be enacted within the community. In this thesis the use of roles aims at improving collaboration for inquiry-based learning without undermining learners’ agency. The use of roles can leverage Scardamalia's (2002) collective responsibility, which referred to the fact that the responsibility for the

success of the group is not with the leader and it is distributed across all the partici- pants in the group. In this sense, a shared responsibility might lead to a fruitful collab- oration fuelled by aspects like knowledge asymmetry. This term, that supposedly leads to conflicting interactions between peers, referred to the fact that members of the group might have more or better information than others in a certain topic and vice versa. Moreover, the use of roles can help to foster learners’ agency. In the Social In- terdependence Theory from Johnson & Johnson (2009), one of the main elements for cooperative learning was individual accountability. The term, that has been defined as the belief that everyone is responsible for his/her performance in learning (Laal & Laal, 2012), can be enhanced with the use of roles.

Based on the idea of CoI and the importance of learners’ agency, in the following study we tried to understand the linkage between the potential impact of the role de- sign and the responsibility of the individual learners by taking over roles in the CoI as also the quality of the collaborative process and its outcome.

8.3 DojoIBL

DojoIBL (Suárez et al., 2016)32 _{is an open source platform that supports students in} collaborative inquiry-based learning processes. It relies in a cloud-based infrastructure that was developed during the weSPOT project (Mikroyannidis et al., 2013) following a design-based research approach where teachers, designers and researchers contributed to an incremental development process.

Figure 37: Student’s view in DojoIBL with the chat placed at the right and the structure of the inquiry on the

middle.

DojoIBL works with the concepts of inquiry structure and inquiry runs. The inquiry structures hold the meta view of the inquiry process which is formed by inquiry activi-

ties organized in inquiry phases. The inquiry runs are instantiations of inquiry struc- tures being used by learners. In short, an inquiry structure can have several inquiry runs that would allow different groups of learners to work independently under the same inquiry structure. Given the basic functionality of DojoIBL to support inquiry related information, let us see how collaboration and learners’ agency are supported.

From the definition of inquiry-based learning in the Community of Inquiry frame- work, the learners engage in social interactions to construct shared knowledge. Thus, they need to be able to communicate either in real time or asynchronously with other members of the inquiry group. For real time communication, DojoIBL provides an independent instant messaging chat for every inquiry group. Through the chat, learners can construct meaning (related to the cognitive presence of the Community of Inquiry framework), position themselves in the community (social presence), receive feedback and scaffolding from the facilitator (teaching presence) and reflect and monitor their own learning processes (metacognitive presence). For the asynchronous communica- tion, the learners can use the comments on the inquiry activities. Another aspect need- ed to support collaboration and Community of Inquiry processes is group awareness. An inquiry process builds upon phases and activities that are related to each other. Thus, being awareness of the recent peer's contributions is key when supporting learn- ers that can be in different locations. For that DojoIBL provides an independent time- line per inquiry group to show the latest updates. The timeline works with the notifica- tion framework, so every contribution is notified in the UI system of DojoIBL and also incorporated to the timeline.

The introduction already presented that to support learners’ agency DojoIBL fea- tures role assignment for the inquiry activities. The roles can be created and assigned to inquiry activities during the design of the inquiry structure. DojoIBL is not bound to a specific set of roles, so the teachers, and also the students as it will be shown in the procedure section, are free to design their own labels for the roles. DojoIBL does not provide a way to link a specific learner to a role in the system. The reason is to enable rotation of roles. In this way, a specific role at the beginning of an inquiry can be taken up by another learners towards the end. In short, this allows for a more flexible sup- port of the inquiry process. Other aspects that contributes to the support of learners’ agency are the calendar and the deadline functionality on the inquiry activities. They help learners to prioritize inquiry activities that might lead to a more efficient distribu- tion of their time. This, in any case, are properties of DojoIBL that allow more control for the learner over the inquiry process.

8.4 Method

The present study examines the suitability of DojoIBL to support collaborative in- quiry-based learning processes and to foster learners’ agency. The study took place at the International School of Eindhoven (ISE). The school, that provides education to

kids from 3 to 18 years old, is divided into primary and secondary school. The second- ary department runs the International Baccalaureate (IB) through the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP). This study took place in the MYP. The innovative ISE culture motivated the school to collaborate with the au- thors, facilitating and enabling this study.

8.4.1 Participants

The participants were 10 students from the Language Acquisition course embedded in the MYP (14-15 years old). They were divided in two groups of five students each. Both groups were given the same conditions to carry out an investigation about: “comprehending spoken and visual text” (group 1) and “comprehending written and visual text” (group 2). During the inquiry project just a few students used their own laptops and the rest borrowed them from the school. Before the inquiry project start- ed, the students were informed about their participation in a research experiment and their parents signed the informed consent.