CollAnnotator — A Support Tool for Content Analysis According to Community of Inquiry Framework

Abstract

Community of Inquiry (CoI) model is a framework with socio-constructivist roots, which describes an online learning community on three interdependent components: cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence. Content analysis is widely used to examine transcripts of computer mediated conversations between students in a community of inquiry. However, there are no dedicated support tools for this process (apart from generic commercial software for qualitative data analysis). Therefore, in this paper we propose a content analysis tool specifically built for CoI, called CollAnnotator. The system provides several important features such as: comprehensive annotation functionality, support for multiple categories per unit of analysis, support for multiple coders and the negotiation process, detailed statistics and reports with graphical visualizations, all in an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The paper describes the tool rationale, functionalities and some implementation details.