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From posts to patterns: A metric to characterize discussion board activity in online courses
Bliss, Catherine A. and Lawrence, Betty

PublishedAugust 2009
JournalJournal of Asynchronous Learning Networks
Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 15-32
CountryUnited 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 focusTeaching presence
MethodologyQuantitative
PopulationUndergraduate
Study designCase study
Data analysisContent analysis
ContributionEmpirical
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."
LanguageEnglish
ISSN2472-5730
RefereedYes
RightsCC BY
DOI10.24059/olj.v13i2.1665
ExportBibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar



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