From posts to patterns: A metric to characterize discussion board activity in online courses
Published | August 2009 |
Journal | Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 15-32 |
Country | United States, North America |
ABSTRACT
Asynchronous text based discussion boards are included in many online courses, however strategies to compare their use within and between courses, from a disciplinary standpoint, have not been well documented in the literature. The goal of this project was to develop a multi-factor metric which could be used to characterize discussion board use in a large data set (n=11,596 message posts) and to apply this metric to all Mathematics courses offered in the January 2008 term by the Center for Distance Learning at Empire State College. The results of this work reveal that student participation rates, quantity of student posts, quality of student posts and the extent of threading are well correlated with instructor activity.Keywords | distance learning · discussion board · asynchronous learning · student participation · instructor roles · educationally valuable talk · metric · mathematics · online learning |
CoI focus | Teaching presence |
Methodology | Quantitative |
Population | Undergraduate |
Study design | Case study |
Data analysis | Content analysis |
Contribution | Empirical |
Study aim | "... the development and application of a metric is presented which is suitable for analyzing discussion board use patterns in large data sets." |
Finding | "... the presence of guidelines, feedback and instructor presence is correlated with greater student participation, quantity of posts, quality of discussion and extent of threading." |
Language | English |
ISSN | 2472-5730 |
Refereed | Yes |
Rights | CC BY |
DOI | 10.24059/olj.v13i2.1665 |
Export | BibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar |
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