Requiring Discussion Board Responses
July 21st, 2009
If you’ve ever taught an online course, or used a discussion board feature in any class, you may have wondered as I did whether to require students to respond to other students. Also, should I, as the instructor, respond to all the students’ posts or does that inhibit other students from responding? An article by An, Shin, and Lim in Computers & Education looks at these questions.
They used three groups of students (unfortunately they used intact class sections rather than random assignment) and used the following facilitation approaches:
- Group 1: Students required to respond to two posts and instructor responds to all initial posts
- Group 2: Students not required to respond and instructor responds to all initial posts
- Group 3: Students required to respond to two posts and instructor does not respond to students’ initial posts
Influence on posting:
Group 2 (students not required to respond) differed from the other groups on a variety of measures. First, they had significantly fewer peer replies. In most cases, students did not reply to their peers at all. The only exception was one session in which students were split onto groups of three; in this case students did respond to each other. In addition, social network analysis revealed that students in group 2 had fewer connections between contributors and the network centered more on the instructor, rather than being dispersed among participants.
Groups 1 and 3 were similar, except that there were more overall posts in group 3 and no single participant contributed more than 21% of the posts.
In the end, however, student overall satisfaction ratings for the course were highest in group 2. It should be noted that the sample size per group on the satisfaction ratings (10, 15, and 6 in each group respectively) were very small. However, it is an interesting trend that deserves further analysis. Do students put more value in having the instructor respond than students? Do they not like being required to respond to other comments?
The other question not addressed is whether there were differences in learning outcomes among the groups. Does having the instructor respond lead to greater learning outcomes? Do the students learn more if they are required to engage with other students?
However, this does confirm what I thought, which is that if you don’t require students to respond to each other, they won’t do it. The article does suggest, however, that if they are in small groups, even without a requirement, they will respond.
There is also some suggestion that if the instructor does not respond, the students will respond more. As one more twist, I would also like to see what happens if the instructor does not respond to all initial posts, but a selection of them. And get some random assignment going!
An, H., Shin, S., & Lim, K. (2009). The effects of different instructor facilitation approaches on students’ interactions during asynchronous online discussions Computers & Education, 53 (3), 749-760 DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2009.04.015
Tags: discussion board facilitation
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July 22nd, 2009 at 5:49 am
[...] If you’ve ever taught an online course, or used a discussion board feature in any class, you may have wondered whether to require students to respond to other students. Also, should I, as the instructor, respond to all the students’ posts or does that inhibit other students from responding? An article by An, Shin, and Lim in Computers & Education looks at these questions. more… [...]