Comparing the Impact of Two Different Designs for Online Discussion
ICWL '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Advances in Web Based Learning
Discovering genres of online discussion threads via text mining
Computers & Education
The impact of ICT on work-life experiences among university Teaching Assistants
Computers & Education
How does students' motivation relate to peer-moderated online interactions?
CSCL'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computer supported collaborative learning - Volume 1
Overherd: designing information visualizations to make sense of student's online discussions
ICLS '10 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - Volume 2
Understanding online knowledge sharing: An interpersonal relationship perspective
Computers & Education
Procrastination, participation, and performance in online learning environments
Computers & Education
The role of scaffolding and motivation in CSCL
Computers & Education
The effect of moderator's facilitative strategies on online synchronous discussions
Computers in Human Behavior
Design for co-moderation in online learning communities
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Students' web-based actions when linking theory and practice
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Analyzing the students' behavior and relevant topics in virtual learning communities
Computers in Human Behavior
Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference
Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Learning: Students' Perspective
International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design
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As asynchronous discussion forums become more prevalent in online and flexible-delivery modes of teaching, understanding the role that instructors play in student learning in these forums becomes an important issue. Whether the instructor chooses to lead discussions or to keep a low profile can affect student participation in surprising ways. In this study, we investigate how instructor participation rates, the timing of instructor postings (during or at the end of a forum) and nature of their postings (questions, answers or a mix of the two) relate to student participation and perception. Using archives containing over 40,000 postings to nearly 400 discussion forums, together with over 500 university evaluation survey responses collected over six consecutive semesters, we analysed student and instructor postings to discussion forums, student responses to university evaluation surveys, and instructor and student responses to surveys carried out as part of this project. We collected both quantitative and qualitative responses on how instructors believe they behave in discussion forums and compared these with statistical analysis of the forums, and then looked at how the instructors' behaviour correlated with students' participation and perceptions. We found that the way that instructors post to forums may influence students' forum discussions and participation in unexpected ways. We show that instructors' perceptions of how they teach online do not necessarily agree with our observations, and that intuitive measures such as the rate of student participation and the length of discussion threads are not necessarily good ways to judge the 'health' of discussion forums or the quality of learning taking place.