Abstract
Advances in technology reinforce the imperative to obtain further insight into the factors that impact online interaction in online environments. Even though past researchers have extracted factors impacting student online interaction and engagement, there is a lack of research that uncovers the dynamics of these relationships and investigates the impact of a comprehensive set of factors on student online interaction at the same time. Thus, this paper seeks to fill this gap by employing a causal loop approach to uncover the interrelationships of these factors that contribute to a positive impact on students’ learning outcomes, and to evaluate satisfaction and engagement in online courses by focussing on students’ online interaction. To this end, a rich qualitative data set was obtained from an online focus group consisting of students from a large online course, and a thematic analysis was conducted resulting in identifying different factors that played a role in the topic under study. More importantly, causal loop modelling was used to model these factors and their causal interrelationships.
Highlights
Online education is an educational medium that has enabled communities of learners and their teachers to interact with one another even while located in different geographical locations
The goal of our research is to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors and drivers that contribute to student online interaction, participation and involvement with an online course and their causal relationships
After analysing the data and creating the thematic analysis, the findings were used to generate a list of potentially important variables associated with online interaction and engagement in an online course, and used to develop descriptive causal loop diagrams (CLD)
Summary
Online education is an educational medium that has enabled communities of learners and their teachers to interact with one another even while located in different geographical locations. An essential aspect of online learning environments is active engagement with learners, course contents and instructors (Tung; Nor, Hamat, and Embi 2012; Kuo, Walker, and Schroder 2010a; Kyei-Blankson, Ntuli, and Donnelly 2016). Web-based learning provides students and instructors with the ability to interact with each other through different technologies such as email, discussion boards, synchronous chat areas, etc. Social media and other Web 2.0 technologies have been widely adopted for educational purposes.
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