Exploring Students’ Changing Conceptions About eLearning Leadership

Developing complex understanding of abstract concepts is a significant challenge in learning design. Different pedagogical designs have been reported in the literature to address such challenges, gauging the extent of change and evolution in students’ understanding remains difficult. This paper investigates the potential of Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) in offering insights on changing understanding at class, group, and individual levels in a masters-level course. The course design aimed to foster deep understanding of complex concepts by aligning course goals with weekly readings, individual learning tasks and group projects. During each week, students were required to complete tasks demanding progressively higher order cognitive engagement based on Bloom's Taxonomy. SOLO Taxonomy served as a framework to assess the extent to which students were able to grasp key constructs and make connections among them to construct a coherent, nuanced understanding. ENA is adopted as a methodology to explore whether students changed in their understanding over the duration of the course as reflected by the connections among concepts in students’ postings on the class discussion forum at the class, group and individual levels. Findings reveal that as a class, students increased in their ability to connect more abstract concepts with phenomenological constructs and pragmatic concerns over time. However, there were nuanced differences among groups and even among individuals within the same group. Findings are discussed within the context of learning analytics to inform learning design, and desirable enhancements to ENA as a learning analytics tool are proposed to reveal trajectories of students’ deepening understanding.