Dr. Arulchelvan from Anna University in India has written
a paper in the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education that analyzes
online forums for positive interactivity that fosters learning. The survey was
conducted on 250 students from different media courses. He studied what
beneficial practices fostered online learning and furthered the educational
learning needs of the students. Through this study it was found that
interactivity, use of content, and student preferences had a bearing on the
learning level.
Online forums are often difficult to measure and
judge. Some focus on content and some focus more on quantity of posts. Quantity
of student posts can be an indication that students are interested in
particular topics. They will naturally respond to those questions are of more
interest to them personally. Analyzing quantity can help determine the overall
interest in certain questions which should be fostered in the remaking of the
courses in the future.
Interactively helps students learn by hedging each other’s
experiences and knowledge. By discussing issues openly students can learn about
varying perspectives on issues and incorporate these perspectives into their
understandings and alternative explanations. It also provides the student with
a social feedback about the varying ways in which people see these
perspectives.
Professors often use knowledge density, message
length, and message count as methods of evaluating online discussion forms.
Density includes the overall quality and depth of the work that helps to ensure
students understand the material. Length includes the ability to discuss
concepts at length. Message count helps professors understand how active
students are in the forums.
The study found that as a learning tool 72% use
online forums, 63% blogs, 51% web based training, 38% wikis, 20% podcasts, and
7% learning tools. As a primary method of learning online discussion forums
appear to be common. A total of 82% believe online forums support learning while
18% disagreed. Online learning forums appear to have large support among
students.
The type of information that is included in a forum
is of interest to students as well. The results show that 90% of students
prefer textual explanations, 63% prefer links, 70% prefer images, 19% prefer
audio and 64% prefer video. The students gravitated toward text, images, video,
and links in their discussion forums. The use of such multimedia may further
help engage students through interactivity.
It is important to ensure that the content of the
course is credible and this should be managed by the instructor/moderators. The
key topics that create building blocks to the next level of thinking should be
controlled. How students understand these things and how they come to these
understandings is more open for debate. In general, students will use their
personal experiences to determine the validity of the concepts. They will use
the forum and its multimedia aspects in ways that encourage higher levels of
information obtainment.
Arulchelvan, S. (2011). Online interaction forums as
learning tool among the media students- an analysis. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, (12), 4.
