Online Discussion Posts Research Articles

Enhance adult students' online knowledge construction: Exploring effective instructional designs and addressing barriers

AbstractBackground StudyAsynchronous online discussions are vital venues for collaborative knowledge construction. However, the lack of appropriate instruction designs poses challenges in promoting deep and substantive engagement with the core subject matter. This paper explores how to enhance adult students' knowledge construction in the context of asynchronous online discussions at an open university in Taiwan.ObjectivesThis study explores instructional designs aimed at promoting online knowledge construction among adult students and overcoming barriers to this process.MethodsThis study used a convergent parallel mixed methods design to collect concurrently both quantitative data from the students' online discussion postings for content analysis and qualitative data from the focus group and individual interviews, the online open‐ended questionnaire, and the instructor's observation logs for thematic analysis. Then the results were merged in the interpretation stage.Results and ConclusionThe research highlights the significance of instructional designs in influencing students' level of knowledge construction during online discussions. The findings suggest that instructional designs that provide teacher‐led interim summaries, pose Socratic questions, and incorporate problem‐solving projects can promote higher‐level knowledge construction. However, time constraints, cultural influences, and unfamiliarity with peers negatively affected higher‐order knowledge construction. To address these challenges, culturally responsive and technologically inclusive instructional designs that take into account the specific challenges faced by adult learners are proposed to enhance learning outcomes through active participation.LimitationThe study's limited sample size warrants further research with a larger and more diverse cohort to validate the effectiveness of the proposed instructional designs. Another limitation is the lack of a robust theoretical base for the instructional strategies presented by the current action‐research study. Further examination and broader exploration in online education are needed to prop up proposed pedagogical approaches.

Centring intersectionality and decolonisation in an online undergraduate gender and development course in Canada

ABSTRACT Despite the growing acknowledgement by development academics and educators of the need to decolonise the study and teaching of development, and to apply an intersectional gender lens to development issues, there has been little discussion and few examples of how this can be achieved in an online undergraduate gender and development (GAD) course. A scan of undergraduate GAD course syllabi from Canadian universities revealed an absence of intersectionality and decolonisation as concepts and approaches, minimal linkages between GAD theory and practice, and an uncritical focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this practice note, I share several approaches to centre intersectionality, promote critical and decolonial perspectives, and bridge theory and practice in a newly created online course at the University of the Fraser Valley, BC, Canada. Drawing upon themes that emerged in online discussion posts and course evaluations, I also discuss students’ views.

Influence of Learning Intervention on Online Learners’ Performance

With the expansion of the online learning scale and the rapid development of learning analysis techniques, learning systems can completely record learners’ online learning behavior. What types of learning intervention measures can influence learning performance? How is the intervention working? The above questions are the focus of online courses and emphasize improving the online learning effect. In this research, 96 undergraduates (Classes 1 and 2, Grade 2) majoring in civil engineering and enrolled in the Engineering Surveying online course at the College of Transportation Engineering, Huanghe Jiaotong University, Henan Province, were selected as the research objects and randomly divided into two groups (the experimental group (N = 48) and the control group (N = 48)). Then, conducted a 15-week sustained intervention study through quasi-experimental research, and verified the effectiveness of different types of intervention measures on the learners’ learning performance. Next, a one-way analysis of variance was conducted, based on the pretesting of the performance data, the quality of online discussion posts, the effective learning duration, and the online final test results. Research results showed no obvious differences between the experimental group and control group in the online final test results from the previous semester (P = 0.347). The online learners’ learning performance was influenced by three aspects of the learning intervention, that is, apparent differences in the posting quality in the learning prompt intervention (T = 8.23, P < 0.01), the online learning duration in the process monitoring intervention (T = 23.19, P < 0.01), and the online final test results in the achievement incentive intervention (T = 6.08, P < 0.01). The research results have an important reference value for implementing intervention strategies in the online learning environment, judging the effectiveness of such strategies according to curve changes in performance, and using the mass data of learners recorded by online learning platforms.

Who is caring for nurses? A qualitative description of psychological influence of COVID-19 pandemic on RNs’ self-efficacy and job satisfaction

Working while undertaking graduate education in nursing is challenging at any time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many nurses continued to work on the frontline while completing their graduate studies. Healthcare workers, including nurses, were routinely exposed to several types of psychological trauma during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we seek to generate an understanding of the psychological influence of COVID-19 on registered nurses’ (RNs’) self-efficacy and job satisfaction while commencing graduate studies in nursing and working in clinical practice during the pandemic. A qualitative descriptive design was used to explore written reflections from 72 RNs enrolled in their first Master of Nursing graduate course at an online university. The RNs’ online discussion postings related to the impact of the pandemic on nursing. Data were analysed using content and thematic analysis. Analysis revealed five overriding themes around job satisfaction and self-efficacy: level of professional involvement and guilt, communication of information and leadership, psychological and physical wellbeing, the safety of self and others, and relationships to and within the nursing profession. Overall, a strong sense of kinship contributed to job satisfaction and self-efficacy. Findings confirmed the need for so-called “aftercare” for nurses by leadership and administrators. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been considerable on the individual nurse’s sense of self-efficacy and job satisfaction, and this is particularly noted in nurses who commenced graduate studies during the pandemic.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO UNDERSTAND FAMILY CAREGIVER PERSPECTIVES ON ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR PERSONS WITH ALS

Abstract ALS Forum (alsforums.com) is an online support group for those who have motor neuron disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It provides information, advice, connection, care, and assistance to persons living with ALS and their family caregivers. This study aimed to analyze the online discussion posts by caregivers of persons with ALS and assess their perceptions, experiences, and challenges of using assistive technologies (AT). Posts were extracted from the ALS caregiver discussion forum via web scraping using Python in March 2022. The extracted posts are dated between June 2005 and January 2022. The total number of posts and replies generated during this period was 52,292 by 2,397 unique users. Additional searches were conducted using assistive technology-related keywords to create the text dataset. A total of 263 posts by 137 unique users were identified. After the initial review, 186 posts were included in the final analysis. Thematic analysis revealed six major themes: (1) Uses of AT (automation/control, communication, mobility); 2) Barriers and Facilitators (cost, effort to learn new technology, rejection, interoperability, customer service); 3) Usability (hardware and software-related); 4) Sharing Experience on AT; 5) Giving Advice; 6) Seeking Information on AT. The findings are consistent with previous literature that online health discussion forums provide access to rich data that contains lived experiences of patients and caregivers. The findings may inform the design of future assistive technology that incorporates the patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives to increase the adoption and long-term sustainability of the technology for people living with ALS and their caregivers.

The impact of a multimodal professional network on developing social capital and research capacity of faculty at historically black colleges and universities

This qualitative case study examined how a multimodal professional network environment (STEM for all Video Showcase) affected five STEM educational researchers’ capacity to engage in grant funded research at U.S. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Guided by the social capital and professional network literature as a conceptual framework, we analyzed data from surveys, interviews, and online discussion posts. We aimed to understand HBCU-based researchers’ supports and barriers in writing and/or conducting grant funded research in STEM education, and ways in which the multimodal professional network experience supported their research and professional networking, if at all. We found that organizational structures shaped participants’ social capital as well as their grant funded research activities. Further, participating in a multimodal professional network enabled participants to further develop their research capacity and to also expand their collegial networks. We offer recommendations for institutions to support the research endeavors of their faculty and suggest ways in which organizations using or developing professional multimodal networks can enhance faculty research development.

Automated post scoring: evaluating posts with topics and quoted posts in online forum.

Online forumpost evaluationis an effective way for instructors to assess students’ knowledge understanding and writing mechanics. Manually evaluating massive posts costs a lot of time. Automatically grading online posts could significantly alleviate instructors’ burden. Similar text assessment tasks like Automated Text Scoring evaluate the writing quality of independent texts or relevance between text and prompt. And Automatic Short Answer Grading measures the semantic matching of short answers according to given problems and correct answers. Different from existing tasks, we propose a novel task, Automated Post Scoring (APS), which grades all online discussion posts in each thread of each student with given topics and quoted posts. APS evaluates not only the writing quality of posts automatically but also the relevance to topics. To measure the relevance, we model the semantic consistency between posts and topics. Supporting arguments are also extracted from quoted posts to enhance posts evaluation. Specifically, we propose a mixture model including a hierarchical text model to measure the writing quality, a semantic matching model to model topic relevance, and a semantic representation model to integrate quoted posts. We also construct a new dataset called Online Discussion Dataset containing 2,542 online posts from 694 students of a social science course. The proposed models are evaluated on the dataset with correlation and residual based evaluation metrics. Compared with measuring posts alone, experimental results demonstrate that incorporating topics and quoted posts could improve the performance of APS by a large margin, more than 9 percent on QWK.

Exploration of a Short-term Learning Community Focused on Evidence-based Occupational Therapy Interventions for Children and Youth with Autism

Continuing education (CE) for occupational therapists typically takes place in workshops, seminars, or webinars with little support for practice change after the event concludes. Continuing education that occurs over an extended time with opportunities for social learning and competence assessment may improve knowledge translation. This study explored how pediatric occupational therapists who participated in a short-term, online learning community acquired new knowledge about evidence-based interventions from learning activities and how they applied this new knowledge to practice. Weekly modules with facilitated discussions, competency self-assessment, and peer-reviewed journal article readings occurred over a six-week period. An exploratory design included content analysis of participants’ online discussion postings, goal-setting activities, reflections, and a researcher-developed evaluation survey. Of the 19 participants who completed the evaluation survey, 17 participants indicated that the case simulation helped to assess their competence and that readings on evidence-based interventions obtained from ProQuestTM were helpful. All participants (n = 19) agreed that the learning community enriched their understanding of how to work with children and youth with autism spectrum disorder and they planned to apply new knowledge to their practice. Qualitative data analysis yielded two themes: becoming evidence-based and integrating evidence into practice. A community of occupational therapists with shared interests who participated in socially mediated learning opportunities with multiple educational components increased understanding and application of evidence-based interventions. Future research should investigate the relationship between engagement in a short-term learning community and application of evidence-based interventions with follow-up.

Don’t lose your moustache: community and cultural identity on the Uyghur internet in China

ABSTRACT This article reports on data collected from the online community forums of four Uyghur language websites between 2014–2016. These posts are representative of a moment in time in which the Uyghur cultural identity was being threatened by increasingly restrictive Chinese government policies. Concept coding was applied to online discussion posts and comments, through which we identified common ideas and ‘concepts’ from the emergent themes. Findings demonstrate how these Uyghur language websites served as a platform for an online community to negotiate their cultural identity and strengthen community ties. Uyghur individuals posted materials that built cultural knowledge, reinforced cultural pride, and encouraged community cultural support.

EFL Undergraduate and Graduate Learners’ Views on a Writing Intensive Online Subject Matter Course

This classroom-based qualitative case study is to illustrate how an English as a subject matter course is taught and examine 17 EFL undergraduate and post-graduate learners’ experiences in and views on their content learning as well as weekly activities in a 15 week-long online course. The participant engaged in doing weekly readings, listening to PPT-based lectures, writing thought papers (TPs) and revising them based on instructor and peer feedback, and joining weekly discussion activities. According to analyses of the data such as learners’ weekly writings, instructor and peer feedback, online discussion posts on an LMS, and an informal mid-term survey and final–self-evaluation, the students had various levels of positive experiences and difficulties due to course demands. Regarding disciplinary specific writing assignments, they valued instructor feedback and considered important focusing on logical flow and coherent organizational structure in addition to appropriate use of such linguistic elements as word choice, vocabulary and grammar. The results of this case study of embedding intensive writing in a disciplinary course shed important pedagogical insights on how to strike balance between teaching subject matter content and ‘writing to learn’ as well as ‘learning to write’.

Fine grained analysis of students’ online discussion posts

Collaborative discussions should engage all students, not just a few who dominate (“leaders”) while others participate as “followers” (Zhu, 2006). Cunningham (1991) noted that collaborating learners bring, discuss and debate multiple perspectives to develop their own position while acknowledging others' views. Higher levels of knowledge construction emerged when posts stimulated frequent reply by multiple participants (Aviv, Erlich, Ravid, & Geva, 2003) and were strongly content- and task-oriented (Rovai, 2007). So, to help students more actively and productively engage in knowledge-constructing discussions, an instructor needs to detect students' posts that do not stimulate replies, identify content those posts introduce, and guide students to revise posts to encourage peers' responses. However, such monitoring would be very time- and energy-consuming, especially in large-enrolment courses (Hura, 2010). To set a stage for developing a classifier to automate these tasks, we proposed 10 rhetorical moves characteristic of the interactive mode of Chi and Wylie's ICAP framework (2014) and categorized fine-grained content in discussion posts using these moves. We then identified attributes of posts that triggered a greater number of responses. Rhetorical moves of “asking questions,” “requesting justification,” “building-on,” “giving a reason” and “making a claim” triggered more peer responses. Posts with moves of “disagreeing,” “comparing” and “making claims” predicted students' achievement on a test and an argumentative writing task. We propose analytics for learners and instructors about forming and revising posts to promote constructive discussions and subsequent achievements.

Pre-service School Leaders’ Sensemaking of Supervising for Equity

Given increasing diversity in the United States and enduring educational inequities, leadership preparation programs are increasingly called upon to prepare pre-service leaders (PSLs) for social justice. In this qualitative study, we draw on sensemaking theory to examine how 83 PSLs enrolled in a supervisory preparation course grappled with the call to embrace leadership for equity. The data collected in this study included transcripts of in-class discussions, online discussion posts, and individual reflections. Findings suggest PSLs negotiated prescribed resources (video, readings, the Danielson framework, and class discussions) and selected resources (personal and professional experiences) to make sense of hypothetical scenarios and grapple with what it means to be an equity-oriented school leader. The authors discuss pedagogical insights for equity-oriented leadership preparation programs.

Rice Bunny and #WoYeShi: Online Reactions of Overseas Chinese to the #MeToo Movements in China and the West

Since October of 2017, the “Me Too” movement shook the United States, led to the resignation of powerful men, and quickly spread to the rest of the world. The Me Too movement became a heated topic and generated zealous debates and arguments on a popular Chinese diaspora social network site. This study samples the online articles and discussion posts from this uncensored social network site to study the perceptions of Chinese diasporas on the Me Too movement. Using critical analysis method, this study examines how women participating in the Me Too movement are perceived, how Chinese diasporas perceive the Me Too movement in China and the Western countries, and how men and women respond to the Me Too movement differently on this online community.

“We cannot imagine”: US preservice teachers' Othering of trans and gender creative student experiences

Research suggests that teachers are not meeting the needs of trans and gender creative students. Thus, we ask: How do US preservice teachers (PSTs) discursively construct the experiences of trans and gender creative students? How are these constructions informed by and reinscribe broader gender normativities in educational contexts? We analyzed 549 PST authored, online discussion posts from an educational foundations course, finding PSTs lacked familiarity with, and engaged in rhetorical distancing from, trans and gender creative student experiencessuggesting barriers to empathy that may obstruct teacher-student relationships and promotion of equity, which teacher education is called to address.

Preparing Teacher Education Students to Integrate Mobile Learning into Elementary Education

The wide adoption of mobile technology has greatly influenced K-12 education. In teacher education programs, it is necessary for educators to train teacher education students to use mobile technology for educational purpose. This paper reports an exploratory effort in preparing elementary education students for mobile learning. The participants’ perceptions of mobile learning and intended use of mobile technology were examined through the analyses of their online discussion posts, responses to survey items and their projects. Their perceived benefits of mobile learning, limitations of mobile technology, their intended implementation of mobile learning and the challenges they anticipated were reported. Implications and recommendations were discussed regarding the knowledge of mobile apps, pedagogical practices and some non-instructional issues.

Artificial lawn people

This paper explores a new artificial political ecology through a novel digital methodology. The emotional impacts of the replacement of living turfgrass landscapes with synthetic simulacra are researched via a netnography of animated and polarised online discussion. We investigate how the cultural use of domestic lawns has extended into the creation of non-living artificial lawns and how the environmental values of these new landscapes are debated. Synthetic polymer (plastic) grasses are increasingly being used as alternatives to turfgrass in domestic gardens, changing urban ecologies. We examine the emotional landscapes that are reproduced in online discourse. Paul Robbins showed that a certain suite of behaviours constitutes ‘Lawn People’. Here we demonstrate that ‘Artificial Lawn People’ act in reference to cultural expectations of a ‘good’ lawn to produce non-living, homogeneous, green and tidy gardens, yet their actions spark fierce criticism from others who do not value this new synthetic nature. Our research involved analysis of 948 online discussion posts, and introduces a secondary notion of ‘artificial people’ as our subjects were anonymous contributors to virtual public debates on the environment: generating impassioned polyvocal contestation. Mumsnet.com is a space of heated discussion between proponents and opponents of artificial lawns. We identify three topics: (i) emotional responses: artificial grass is polarising, and its social value contested; (ii) bio-physical affects: plastic fibres impact human and non-human life and (iii) environmental values: turfgrass replacement influences local and global political ecologies. The conclusions shed light on the dynamic relationships between the emotional values of living and non-living landscapes.

The Development of a Community of Inquiry Over Time in an Online Course: Understanding the Progression and Integration of Social, Cognitive and Teaching Presence

The purpose of this study was to explore the dynamics of an online educational experience through the lens of the Community of Inquiry framework. Transcript analysis of online discussion postings and the Community of Inquiry survey were applied to understand the progression and integration of each of the Community of Inquiry presences. The results indicated a significant change in teaching and social presence categories over time. Moreover, survey results yielded significant relationships among teaching presence, cognitive presence and social presence, and students’ perceived learning and satisfaction in the course. The findings have important implications theoretically in terms of confirming the framework and practically by identifying the dynamics of each of the presences and their association with perceived learning and satisfaction.

From college composition to ESL: Negotiating professional identities, new understandings, and conflicting pedagogies

This study examined how teaching assignments in the university's first-year composition program and graduate coursework informed six MA TESOL students' identity development and negotiations as ESL/EFL teachers in the United States. The collection and analysis of the data, which consisted of two sets of interviews and online discussion posts, were guided by poststructural understandings of identity. The findings describe the complex negotiations of participants' teacher identities, their new understandings about English and teaching, and the conflicting pedagogies they experienced. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this study for practitioners and teacher educators in TESOL, college composition, and teacher education programs.

Impact of Online Discussions on Web Based Assessments

The practice of including online discussion posts to traditional courses is increasing. Online discussions allow for active learning to occur as students express their ideas and respond to others. The time and thought provided by online discussion posts allows students to utilize higher level cognitive skills. Web-based assessments are another technology tool that instructors are including in their courses. This study examined the impact of online discussion posts on achievement of web-based assessments for an upper level undergraduate business and technology writing intensive course. Using a treatment group and a control group, student achievement scores for the online assessments were measured. Results indicate that assessed grades of the treatment groups were higher than the control group, however statistical significance was mixed among the web assessments. The results further illustrate the need for additional research into online discussions applied to web-based assessments.

Graduate Students’ Antecedents to Meaningful and Constructive Discussions: Developing Potential Collaborative Online Interactions

The study analyzes evidence of how online graduate students perceive antecedents to productive online discussion posts and exchanges. It seeks to document how graduate students perceive good and bad discussions (both face-to-face and online). Through descriptive qualitative analysis we consider how graduate students describe online productive social interactions. Graduate student data provide potential elements and “rules” for discussion posts and group work that promote higher-order cognitive skills. As one graduate student succinctly offered, “I enjoyed reading my classmates’ lists, especially because it was so informative to learn what characteristics my classmates find most important in regards to discussions. This information will help me in how I approach our group work and discussion throughout this class. I was happy for the opportunity to use everyone’s wonderful posts in order to expand, elaborate, and clarify my own thoughts.”