Abstract:

This study examined university students’ online academic communication to determine how their communication developed integrated learning activities for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The target course is designed to promote the exchange of views to understand the world issues and learn the ESD key competencies. During the lesson, each student was allotted one of four assignments. All assignments covered the same field of poverty and comprised two indicators for which students could obtain detailed longitudinal data through the World Bank’s online database.

Students selected a developing country and compared "the proportion of people living on less than $ 1.9 per day with the successive change over time" with one of four assigned comparative indicators.

After completing the self-regulated learning, they were asked to submit their reports to a Moodle discussion forum and reports were then shared. The students were also able to post and exchange ideas with others. The collected messages were introduced into the dataset for the emerged community.

First, we use a Collective Intelligence (CI) approach and extract relevant descriptions. When community members collaborate on this process through a shared vision and expertise of the key stakeholders involved, it’s called CI. In an asynchronous online discussion, various factors seemed to influence the emergence of CI.

Second, we introduced criteria; ESD competencies proposed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. While ESD competencies cover eight aspects and due to the characteristics of our course assignment, five possible competencies for indicators to analyze messages in the community emerged:
1) systems thinking competency,
2) anticipatory competency,
3) normative competency,
4) collaboration competency, and
5) critical thinking competency.

Third, Social Network Analysis (SNA) was introduced in order to evaluate a holistic view of the community and to present groups that have emerged within it.

Finally, qualitative content analysis and sentiment analysis were applied to understand which communication messages prompted CI and ESD competencies.

The following research aims were formulated:
RA1 Elucidate holistic characteristics of the community.
RA2 Identify the characteristics of CI messages with cooccurrence of ESD competencies.
RA3 Unfold ESD competencies into resultant messages.
RA4 Delineate what competencies contributed to the development of CI in the disciplinary community.

A total of 327 messages from 120 students were analyzed. A higher percentage of reciprocated messages was observed (37%). While the collaboration competency of ESD competencies had higher cooccurrence with CI, the collaboration competency and normative competency emerged with highest c-coefficient among pairs of ESD competencies. The discrepancy appears to be due to the fact that CI has characteristics of capital, but collaboration competency is detected through activities of knowledge construction. CI is described by more negative sentiment sentences, but collaborative competency was described by more positive sentiment sentences. While the similarity between critical thinking competency and CI in terms of negative sentiment has been discussed, the existence of an individual process of reconceptualizing norms and opinions has been put forward as a reason.

Keywords:

Collective intelligence, ESD competencies, qualitative content analysis, sentiment analysis, social network analysis.