Investigating Students’ Experiences with Collaboration Analytics for Remote Group Meetings

Remote meetings have become the norm for most students learning synchronously at a distance during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This has motivated the use of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) solutions to support the teaching and learning practice in these settings. However, the use of such solutions requires new research particularly with regards to the human factors that ultimately shape the future design and implementations. In this paper, we build on the emerging literature on human-centred AIED and explore students’ experiences after interacting with a tool that monitors their collaboration in remote meetings (i.e., using Zoom) during 10 weeks. Using the social translucence framework, we probed into the feedback provided by twenty students regarding the design and implementation requirements of the system after their exposure to the tool in their course. The results revealed valuable insights in terms of visibility (what should be made visible to students via the system), awareness (how can this information increase students’ understanding of collaboration performance), and accountability (to what extent students take responsibility of changing their behaviours based on the system’s feedback); as well as the ethical and privacy aspects related to the use of collaboration analytics tools in remote meetings. This study provides key suggestions for the future design and implementations of AIED systems for remote meetings in educational settings.