# Online Group Student Peer-Communication as an Element of Open Education
## 3 Results
### The First Part of the Study: Qualitative Analysis of Student Group Conversation
The maximum intensity was 100 messages in two days, while the minimum intensity was 100 messages in 16 days. The average value was 6.3 days. The average number of messages per day was 24.9. **Communicative syntax**. As mentioned in the first part of the study, it was customary for students to divide sentences into short phrases and send each as a separate sentence. Therefore, there were fewer completed phrases in 100 messages: from 45 to 93, on average 66. In this case, in conversations, 2.2-6.1 words per message were used, and on average 4.5 words. **Emotional expressiveness**. The traditional punctuation marks in online communication were supplemented or replaced by visual symbols. The most common way to show certain emotions is to use smileys, special stickers, emoji, etc. Only one of the considered message sequences did not have such visual expressors of emotions at all, while at maximum in 100 messages there were 29 smileys and 43 emoji. On average, one conversation had 14.2 visual expressive symbols. **Interrogativity degree of the polylogue. ** Since one of the basic functions of conversations is operational support, questions (whether a question mark is put or not) constitute an essential part of communication. In the conversations examined, they made up from 7% to 29% of the total number of replicas, and on average 17%. For intuitively clear and instant comparison of groups according to the features of communicative behavior, which is an advantage for the teacher, a visual scheme was developed including basic parameters. The approach, of course, can be used not only for the analysis of intragroup student communication but also for other types of group communication. We defined the average data of groups in the form of illustration, where the character size is the activity of communicators (Figure 2). The size of the text cloud for message is the communication intensity. The average number of words in the sentence is shown in the cloud, interrogativity degree is the size of the question and emotional expressiveness is the size of the smile. A comparative visual representation of several group conversations showed the difference in the features of group communication. For comparison, consider the features of two groups--with  
Figure 2: Average indicators for group communication, presented as an image. the longest (6.1) and the shortest average message size (Figure 3). Other features of the group were large emotional expressiveness (46), slightly increased proportion of participants (73%) and number of interrogative sentences (22) and significantly lower than average communication intensity (12.5 messages per day). The group with the shortest average message size (2.2) (Figure 3b) was characterized by weaker activity of communicators (52%), few interrogative sentences (11) and almost the complete absence of visual expressors of emotions (only three smileys). The indicators visually presented in Figure 3 are indirect in nature; nevertheless, a certain overall picture of the conversation develops. It seems that the first of the considered groups to a greater extent fulfilled the supportive function for the educational process: informational (interrogative sentences) and emotional (visual expressors of emotions). A great interest in communication is visible. Longer sentences may indicate a higher quality of conversation, while the intensity of communication in both cases is relatively small. The available data allow us to provide some information about the content side of communication in Russian universities. Taking all conversations as a whole, we examined the thematic division of the texts. Three main categories were as follows: study (41%), organizational issues (33%) and everyday communication (26%). We analyzed the content of each category in more detail. Within the \"study\" category, the largest number of messages was devoted to questions and answers on various types of certification (tests, exams, term papers and independent work) (18%) of all messages in this category.