The reasons encouraging or inhibiting students active

participation in asynchronous online discussion board:

3 cases from Malaysia

Siew-Woei, Ah-Choo & Cho-ChuanMultimedia University & University of Nottingham (Malaysia

Campus)

Advantages of online discussion

•as a record-keeping between the lecturers, students and peers for the execution of major projects in their courses

•to promote a community of inquiry among the students

•exchange of thoughts

Aim

•It is hoped that active learning would take place and many exchange of thoughts will happen which eventually will lead to meaningful learning.

Problem with online discussion

•Minority of the students participated actively and little means of exchange thoughts happen.

•Majority of students turned themselves into lurkers (passive participation), who do not want to post questions or make comments on a threaded discussion.

Aim

to investigate further what actually influence the students’ decision of being an active or passive participator, by focusing the study in one of the first private higher learning institution in Malaysia.

EXTRACTION FROM PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON THE REASONS THAT ENCOURAGED OR INHIBITED STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION

ON ONLINE DISCUSSION.Studies Encourages Studies Inhibits[9], [10] Online participation is made mandatory. [10] Students are being forced to contribute.[5], [11], [12] Rewards (especially grades) will be given to students. [7], [14] No mark is given to students.

[13], [14] Participation is based on a need that contributes to their assessments. [5], [7], [14], [18] Do not see a need/reason for participation.

[5], [14], [15] Students have some comments on a topic posted earlier. [5], [15] Students have no comment on a topic posted earlier.

[14], [16], [17]

Instructor’s influences (asking questions, giving feedback in time). [19] Questions or comments were already posted by other

students.

[7], [10] Students have interest on the opinions made by their peers. [15] Instructors have concluded/summarized a topic.

[5], [10], [18], [26]

Good usability or interface design of the online discussion software. [5], [20] Other students have not raised any interesting questions.

[18], [28], [29]

Students feel belonging to the online discussion board community. [5], [15], [27] Other students have stirred up the online environment

(pontificate, being threaten, being emotional).

[5] Student has personal relationship with the person who started the thread.

[5], [21], [22], [23], [24]

Students’ posting received no or delayed response from their peers.

[18] Students are comfortable with the discussion board environment. [5], [12], [18], [20] Lack of time to response to a topic.

[7] Students have higher intrinsic motivation. [5], [7], [18], [25], [26]

Poor usability design or interface design of the online discussion software.

[5], [12] Personal traits-extroverts. [7] Students find it troublesome to post.

[5], [7] Students do not know the owner of the topic.

[5], [7], [15] Students lack of knowledge on the topic.

[7] Students lack of privacy or refuse their identity to be revealed.

[12] Poor motivation.[5] , [12] Personal traits-shyness.

3 Categories

Investigation of students’ decision of being an active or passive participator in three different situations

1st study n=79•The course objective was to expose the

students to the deployment of Internet applications.

•reward of 5% out of the assignment total marks

•At the end of the online discussion, a questionnaire (checkbox) was distributed to the students to investigate the reasons of their participations.

•The students were asked to select the four possible reasons that reflected their participation.

First study findings•60% participated because mark was

rewarded and added to the course assessment.

•53% participated because bonus mark was rewarded for each posting made.

•46.47% participated because “the lecturer/tutor emphasizes on the usage of the discussion board”

•only 39% participated because they can reflect and do revision through online discussion.

2nd study n=56

•The course objective was to expose student to media appreciation.

•Half of the topics were rewarded 5% while the others without reward.

•Refer to the paper for the table

2nd study findings• when marks are

allocated, posting and reading participation increased

• differences of the number of their postings were more than 50%.

Topics Rewards No. of Post

Times of read

Topic 1 5% marks 133 536Topic 2 No mark 37 187Topic 3 5% marks 156 444Topic 4 No mark 22 124Topic 5 5% marks 105 367Topic 6 No mark 22 118Topic 7 5% marks 121 329Topic 8 No mark 20 106

the number of times a thread was viewed (passive participation) is often higher than the number of a thread was being commented (active participation).

3rd study n=35• The course objective was to expose the students

to the design of desktop publishing. ▫The participations were informed that no

reward is given for participation. •The duration for discussion is two weeks. •The survey question is “Did you participate in

the discussion board? If yes, write down what made you to do so and if you have not participated, write down why you did not participate.”

• The data was coded according to themes and number of occurrences was labeled as frequency.

3rd study’s finding• The main reason for

students’ participation is to obtain more information or knowledge.

• Students want to gain some marks, get updated with the course and not missed out

• A student would very likely to participate if they are made compulsory to participate.

TABLE 3. FREQUENCY OF REASONS FOR PARTICIPATION AND NOT ABLE TO PARTICIPATE.

Reasons for participation f Reasons for not able to participate f

** To get information/ knowledge 6 * Forget username and password 9

** Want to gain marks/point 2 ** Busy (with other assignments or work) 6

** Mandatory 2 * No Internet access at home 5

* Want to be updated 2 ** Prefer reading only 3

* Don’t want to miss out 2 * Forget of such task 3

** Know it will benefit him/herself 1 ** Don’t understand question or no answer for it 3

** Familiarity with environment 1 ** Answers already answered 2

** Want to share information 1 * Slow connection 2

** Might come out in exam 1 * Forget URL 2

** Want to voice out opinion 1 * Not sure what to do 2

** Don’t think it is important 1

* Don’t like to discuss because it’s headache 1

* Others (confusion with other discussion board available) 8

* Denotes new reasons** Denotes reasons that were also identified in previous research

By understanding these factors sets the basic ground for the discussion boards’ moderators to design their discussion board more effectively so that active learning can occur and meaningful learning takes place.

Understanding reasons, not making

assumptions•Personally investigate the reasons when

a student (or majority) would not participate actively.

•Lurkers-moderators could adopt guidelines that address the issues such as students not seeing the need for online discussion, the behavior of other participants, personality traits, students being at loss of what to contribute, students showing low-level knowledge construction and technical aspects.

Quality is better than quantity

• As listed in Table 1, quality/interesting messages encourages others students to contribute further.

• it is more important for a student to show some form of active learning in online discussion and this must be measured by analyzing the quality of the content posted rather than the number of posting made.

• To check on quality, several forms of assessment such as Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric and others are available on the Internet were adopted to evaluate the quality of messages.

Cautious on tangible rewards

• Finding from the first and second case study revealed that one of the main reasons for students to participate is based on their personal motivation and subsequently their behavior in online discussion.

• tangible rewards is detrimental to their own interest of learning and build up a habit of expecting tangible rewards (especially marks). Use non-tangible reward.

• Although the studies revealed that students’ active participation is mainly due to rewards and not due to intellectual reason such as reflecting or revision on their learning, however, when reward are not given, they still participate based on intrinsic motivation

Promote critical thinking

•As Gokhale mentioned learning collaboratively … promotes critical thinking

•Paraphrasing each other should be avoided •Therefore, students should be convinced of

the advantages of active participation, i.e. the ability of active participation in online discussion could change their thinking behavior from ‘ordinary thinking’ to ‘critical thinking.’

swling@mmu.edu.my