Groupnamics: Designing an Interface for Overviewing and Managing Parallel Group Discussions in an Online Classroom

Instructors facilitating online classes have a limited ability to see and hear interactions of student groups working in parallel, which prevents them from interacting with students effectively. In this work, we explore interface design for providing an overview of parallel group discussions in online classrooms. We derive design considerations through a participatory design process and instantiate them in our visualization interface, Groupnamics. Groupnamics visualizes recent vocal activities and discussion statuses of each group in a one-page view, facilitating identification of groups where intervention may be needed. Our user study with 16 instructors confirmed that Groupnamics can successfully provide cues for when instructors should join group discussions and improvements on the perceived usefulness and ease of use over the baseline interface representing existing videoconferencing tools. Our qualitative results suggest future research directions in interface design for online parallel group discussions.