Full length articleStructure and content of messages in an online environment: An approach from participation
Introduction
The sustained growth of the use of computer-mediated collaborative environments and the different devices used in educational contexts, particularly in higher education («Class Differences», Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010, Yang, 2014), make it increasingly necessary to understand how these formative processes are configured and organised in different use contexts (Lockhorst, Admiraal, & Pilot, 2010). This study analyses a training process of 24 university teachers with the support of a virtual environment. The course entitled “Research and innovation in university teaching”, belongs to a diploma in research and innovation designed to enhance the work of university teachers facing the new educational scenarios in higher education, through the facilitation of theoretical and methodological elements that allow them to investigate and innovate in their educational practice. To meet this goal, the course was facilitated through a collaborative learning environment and organized in thematic forums.
There is agreement that the use of computer-mediated collaborative environments favours a number of characteristics which can contribute considerably to learning, such as information transfer, exchange and development of ideas, exploration of shared resources, and collaboration in the construction of knowledge (Chiang et al., 2014, Lameras et al., 2011). All of these characteristics can be considered of special relevance to learning and may be favoured by using online support tools (Choitz and Lee, 2006, Coll et al., 2014).
However, it is widely shared that the use of these learning spaces by the participants determines largely the potentialities they can achieve (Kupczynski, Gibson, Ice, Richardson, & Challoo, 2011). In this sense, participation is the basis for generating efficient interactions in the learning processes (Hrastinski, 2009, Tseng and Kuo, 2014, Vonderwell and Zachariah, 2005). In spite of the above, participation is no guarantee of learning but is, rather, a condition; thus, it becomes necessary to explore the configuration taken by the messages in discussion forums.
The study of participation in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) considers aspects as diverse as the number and distribution of the participants' messages, the length of the messages, or the permanence time in the environment, to mention the most important ones (Hong and Scardamalia, 2014, Hrastinski, 2008, Lipponen et al., 2003). However, these indicators by themselves are insufficient for studying the learning processes (Meijer, Oolbekkink, Meirink, & Lockhorst, 2013). The above makes it necessary to incorporate the study of the content of the messages (De Wever et al., 2006, Hong and Scardamalia, 2014).
The relation between some structural indicators of activity and the content allows more direct access to the construction of knowledge made by the participants as they collaborate in a learning activity (Coll et al., 2009, Shaw, 2013).
In the same sense, different authors support the thesis that the type of participation developed in online forums is closely related to the depth achieved by the messages in those forums (Dillenbourg et al., 2009, Hrastinski, 2008, Lipponen et al., 2003). In spite of the above, the type of participation, associated with structural indicators of activity, is not necessarily related to the depth reached by those contributions (Hara et al., 2000, Martı́nez et al., 2003, Remesal and Colomina, 2013).
In brief, the study presented here has the purpose of determining the relation between the nature of the messages in an online environment, the level of information, its depth level, and the relation between each of these factors.
Section snippets
Analysis of the participation
One of the main objectives of the present work is to report on the quality of the communicative exchanges during the collaboration process in CSCL environments (Lockhorst, 2004). Various authors note that to complete a task successfully, the group members must participate in different types of activities that bring on mainly a series of communicative exchanges during the collaboration process (Erkens et al., 2005, Janssen et al., 2011, Kreijns, 2004, Van Leeuwen et al., 2014). In this context,
Methodology
The work done uses a case study approach. This type of methodology is common in this line of research (Spector et al., 2013, Stahl et al., 2011). In particular, this study considered the analysis of ten discussion forums that dealt with different contents associated with the introductory course leading to a diploma in research and innovation in university teaching offered by a Chilean university. The methodology used for the analysis of the students' messages in the forums had a mixed character
Results
The first research question refers to the organization of the messages according to their nature, information level, and depth level. With respect to the nature of the messages, it is associated mainly with the content of the task (75.2%), followed by regulatory messages (11.9%), social type messages (7.8%), and messages that could not fit into the categories used (5.1%) (see Table 2a). On the other hand, the 221 content messages were classified, according to their level of information, into
Discussion
Our results show, in agreement with other studies (Bodemer and Dehler, 2011, Coll et al., 2014, Kreijns, 2004), that the nature of the messages is associated mainly with the task's content and, to a much lesser extent, with other types of activities. The existence of a larger number of content messages does not necessarily mean the students achieve a greater elaboration of the knowledge; on the contrary, this quite often hinders its advance because learning requires different participation
Acknowledgements
This research is supported in part by FONDECYT 11140381 “The use of asynchronous learning environments as facilitators of the teaching processes” and for the Ministerio de Educación de Chile, Project USA 1307.
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