Learning Technologies Ph.D. student Xinran Zhu, Hong Shui, and faculty Dr. Bodong Chen’s paper titled Designing Support for Productive Social Interaction and Knowledge Co-construction in Collaborative Annotation won the Best Student Paper Award at the 29th International Conference on Computers in Education. This paper was also nominated for the Best Research Paper Award category.

This paper introduced a generic scaffolding framework of participation roles that was co-designed by instructors and researchers to support collaborative learning activities in online classes. Using a web annotation tool named Hypothes.is, the study piloted the framework in a fully online undergraduate course in Fall 2020. To examine how the framework facilitated social interaction and knowledge co-construction in the class, the study conducted social network analysis and content analysis on students’ annotation data.

This study has practical implications for online teaching and collaborative learning.This study is a part of the Collaborative Annotation in College Classrooms Project.