Toward a CoI Population Parameter: The Impact of Unit (Sentence vs. Message) on the Results of Quantitative Content Analysis

dc.creator	Paul Gorsky
dc.creator	Avner Caspi
dc.creator	Ina Blau
dc.creator	Yodfat Vine
dc.creator	Amit Billet
dc.date	2012-01-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:17:20Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:17:20Z
dc.identifier	1492-3831
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/c34cf65e7ed64410a9a48f5a52486ac3
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/18970
dc.description	The goal of this study is to further corroborate a hypothesized population parameter for the frequencies of social presence versus the sum of teaching presence and cognitive presence as defined by the community of inquiry model in higher education asynchronous course forums. This parameter has been found across five variables: academic institution (distance university vs. campus-based college), academic discipline (exact sciences vs. humanities), academic level (graduate vs. undergraduate), course level (introduction vs. regular vs. advanced), and course size (small vs. medium vs. large), that is, the number of students enrolled. To date, the quantitative content analyses have been carried out using the syntactic unit of message. In an attempt to further establish the parameter’s goodness-of-fit, it is now tested across two different syntactic units, message versus sentence. To do so, the same three-week segments from 15 Open University undergraduate course forums (10 from humanities and five from exact sciences) were analyzed twice—once by the unit message and once by the unit sentence. We found that the hypothesized parameter remained viable when the unit of analysis is the sentence. We also found that the choice of syntactic unit is indeed a critical factor that determines the “content” of the transcript and its inferred meaning.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	Athabasca University Press
dc.relation	http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1073/2081
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/1492-3831
dc.rights	CC BY
dc.source	International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 13, Iss 1 (2012)
dc.subject	Higher education
dc.subject	asynchronous forums
dc.subject	protocol analysis
dc.subject	community of inquiry model
dc.subject	quantitative content analysis
dc.subject	syntactic units
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Special aspects of education
dc.subject	LC8-6691
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Toward a CoI Population Parameter: The Impact of Unit (Sentence vs. Message) on the Results of Quantitative Content Analysis
dc.type	article