Attracting student participation in asynchronous online discussions: A case study of peer facilitation

Abstract

Previous research studies on how to promote student participation in asynchronous online discussions have largely focused on the role of the instructor or tutor as facilitators. Not many investigated student facilitation. This article reports a qualitative study examining the facilitation techniques used by student facilitators to attract their course mates to participate in asynchronous online discussions. Data were collected from the students’ reflection logs and students’ online postings. To explore the extent to which student participation in an online discussion forum is successful, we looked at the depth of discussion threads. We deemed a student facilitator to have successfully attracted other students to participant if the discussion threads had a depth of six or more levels of students’ postings. We then examined in detail and reported the facilitation techniques that were exhibited by the student facilitators. Results showed that seven facilitation techniques were employed; the most frequently used were Socratic questioning and sharing personal opinions or experiences. We end by exploring potential implications for practice and for future research.

Introduction

An asynchronous online discussion environment may be defined as “a text-based human-to-human communication via computer networks that provides a platform for the participants to interact with one another to exchange ideas, insights and personal experiences” (Hew & Cheung, 2003, p. 249). One of the main defining characteristic of an asynchronous online discussion is that the discourse that takes place is not real time. Asynchronous online discussion is increasingly being integrated into onsite educational settings to extend the learning activities beyond the traditional classroom time and space (Xie, DeBacker, & Ferguson, 2006).

Most of the current asynchronous online discussion forums automatically sequences and arranges the messages into various discussion threads (Ganeva, 1999). A discussion thread is a hierarchically organized collection of messages in which all messages but the one that started the discussion are written as replies to earlier messages (Hewitt, 2005). Threads are well-defined and easily identified artifacts; they make it easier for people to trace the evolution of a discourse (Hewitt, 2005). There are now many software packages that offer platforms for threaded asynchronous online discussions such as BlackBoard, Knowledge Community, Knowledge Forum, and Knowledge Constructor.

A review of the literature shows several reasons for the popularity of using asynchronous online discussions in learning. For example, asynchronous online discussion forums are generally available 24 h a day and 7 days a week. This is especially useful, as they allow student-to-student communications to occur at any time and at any distance. In addition, since many of the current asynchronous online discussion forums are solely text-based, students have to explicitly express their thoughts in writing. The very process of writing in itself encourages reflection which helps promote higher level learning such as analysis, synthesis, evaluation as well as clear and precise thinking (Newman, Johnson, Webb, & Cochrane, 1997).