Managing negative emotions in online collaborative learning: a multimodal approach to solving technical difficulties

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify how participants manage technical difficulties during online collaborative learning. We analyze the participation framework in a corpus composed of 30 hours of online collaborative learning among students of an Andean university, their professor, and international experts. The internet-based IT platform used was ZOOM. We present a multimodal interaction of verbal and body language in collaborative activity for the analysis of moment-by-moment evolving social interaction. Also using conversation analysis, we focus on the ways in which participants interact with their words and their non-lexical expression. Thanks to this methodology, we describe the moment-by-moment interactional work performed in collaborative activity.

We have observed how technical difficulties generate social unrest and negative emotions shared among participants. In many cases, these difficulties generate conflicts between participants. We describe how negative emotions are shown in mixed contexts, and how users solved these during online collaborative learning. This study contributes to previous knowledge on the importance of multimodal interaction in displaying engagement and organizing courses of action in meeting settings by analyzing the multimodal construction of one specific situation, that is, a conflict caused by technical issues and managed between users.