Analysing synchronous multimodal interaction tracks from on-line learning: challenges and methodology

Since the last decade, online synchronous audio-graphic learning environments which enable participants to communicate and collaborate in order to achieve a common task have become increasingly popular, particularly in the field of language acquisition. These online learning environments generate complex interactions between participants. Their analysis continues to intrigue researchers about their traces and their processing. The work presented in this paper concerns the methodology used to transcribe and analyze synchronous multimodal interactions coming from a particular online training session. We offer a description of the data-collection protocol, the original coding scheme to transcribe video data into a set of participant's actions, part of them being speech acts which occurred in the different modalities of the system (audio, textchat, text editing, and websites), the organization and the representation of such data. Two examples of analysis, at a macro scale and at a micro scale, give a glimpse of our results, from which the benefits and limits of such approaches and tools are discussed