Analytics of Emerging and Scripted Roles in Online Discussions: An Epistemic Network Analysis Approach

This paper investigates emerging roles in the context of the community of inquiry model. The paper reports the results of a study that demonstrated the application of epistemic network and clustering analyses to reveal the roles that different students assumed during an asynchronous course with online discussions. The proposed method highlights the differences and similarities between emerging and scripted roles based on the development of social and cognitive presences, two key constructs of the model of communities of inquiry.