Identifying Factors that Influence Student’s Participation in an Online Discussion Forum

Abstract

Discussion forums are used frequently in online learning. They are effective tools to encourage critical thinking and analytical reasoning and motivate students to participate in discussions. By actively participating in discussion forums by reading their peer’s posts and comments, students can increase their understanding by clarifying vague concepts. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, educational institutions transitioned to an online teaching method, which was not widely used earlier. The dynamism of the lively discussions that would take place in the offline classes was lost during this time. As a result, many instructors use discussion boards to keep their students engaged in a specific topic and encourage them to debate, evaluate, and criticize one another’s ideas. The social network analysis (SNA) method examines how students engage in an online asynchronous discussion forum. The research study is based on a course called "Engineering Exploration". During the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruptions, this first-year engineering course was taught online. In order to engage in a case study for the Engineering Ethics module, students were invited to post their views and thoughts about the case study in the discussion thread and were informed to comment on their peer’s posts. The research is based on information gathered from the discussion board. Through this study, the authors want to identify the effect of different parameters such as gender, stream, or grades on students’ participation in the discussion forum. The course instructor will gain significant insight from the proposed work on integrating social network analysis on discussion boards. This research study will aid in understanding the network structures of learners’ interactions.