Students’ Patterns and Level of Social Interaction in an Online Forum

Abstract

Of late, learning management system is widely used in higher education. One of the most widely used asynchronous communication tools in online courses offered in LMS platform is discussion forum. For blended or hybrid learning courses, online forum can be used to complement face-to-face sessions. In an online forum environment, the students’ participation and interaction levels can be measured and analyzed using social network analysis. This analysis includes measuring (1) degree centrality, (2) betweenness centrality, (3) closeness centrality, and (4) density. In this study, a total of 23 postgraduate students currently undertaking a blended learning course offered by a public university in Malaysia were involved, in which an online forum was conducted for 3 weeks as part of the course requirement. The finding indicates that the communication among the students in the forum is quite low as the network density value is 0.11. Also, six students were identified as the leaders of the information, five students were identified as bridging participants, 13 students were identified as risk participants, 13 students were identified as isolated participants, while two students were not involved in the discussion. This study suggests some recommendations to increase the students’ engagement in online forum.