The Private University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology UMIT TIROL (www.umit-tirol.at) offers high-quality academic education and advanced training in the fields that have turned out to be of increasing importance in modern health care and technology. For example, in the field of medical informatics, we offer a part-time continuing education program that provides in-depth knowledge in the area of digitization and information management in healthcare. The program is completely online and its course design is based on the Community of Inquiry Framework. This year, we have started a comprehensive project based on the CoI Framework: LACOI: Representation of a Community of Inquiry in Cooperative Online-based Courses through Learning Analytics.

Our goal is to create CoI dashboards for teachers and students and to assess whether they have an impact on teaching, the learning process, or learning outcome. To put it in a nutshell, we investigate whether it is possible to develop a comprehensive, automated representation and visualization of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) and its presences (with emphasis on cognitive and social presence) for individual online-based courses. It is important for us to develop a deep understanding of the premises of the theoretical CoI framework and to implement this in our course designs. For the automated representation of the presences, we use the established coding scheme according to Garrison et al (2001) as a starting point. We have currently been coding a selected course to create a gold standard for automated analyses and face challenges in interpreting the indicators of the coding scheme as well as the content of online discussion contributions.

We will be pleased to share our initial results with the community.

Elske Ammenwerth elske.ammenwerth@umit.at (primary project lead)

Werner Hackl werner.hackl@umit.at

Verena Dornauer verena.dornauer@umit.at

Lisa-Maria Norz lisa-maria.norz@umit.at

Eva Kaczko eva.kaczko@umit.at

We are honored that Dr. Leah Macfadyen from the University of British Columbia supports our project with her expertise.