The effects of instructors' use of online discussions strategies on student participation and performance in university online introductory mathematics courses

Abstract

This study examines instructor strategies for designing and participating in online discussions and how these strategies influence their students' participation and course performance in university introductory online mathematics courses. The study leveraged data and text mining techniques to examine five years of online discussion data automatically collected by a Learning Management System from 72 introductory online mathematics courses involving over 2800 instructors and students who collectively contributed over 22,000 posts. A classification and regression tree (CART) analysis of instructor strategies revealed four instructor participation variables (open-ended discussion, grading, discussion setting, elaborated feedback) that impacted student course performance and nine that did not. Further, students in courses where instructors used open-ended discussion prompts and graded posts had higher average final course grades. An examination of how instructor discussion strategies influenced student participation found that subgroups of students with lower average final course grades tended to engage in less online speaking and listening, while also contributing more posts categorized as social interactions and fewer related to course content. Students in subgroups with higher average final course grades tended to engage in more online listening and contributed more posts coded as higher in knowledge construction.