Asynchronous text based discussion boards are included in many online courses, however strategies to compare their use within and between courses, from a disciplinary standpoint, have not been well documented in the literature. The goal of this project was to develop a multi-factor metric which could be used to characterize discussion board use in a large data set (n=11,596 message posts) and to apply this metric to all Mathematics courses offered in the January 2008 term by the Center for Distance Learning at Empire State College. The results of this work reveal that student participation rates, quantity of student posts, quality of student posts and the extent of threading are well correlated with instructor activity.

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Methods for characterizing asynchronous text-based discussions have received significant attention in the literature. In this study, we examine student and instructor posts made in seventeen undergraduate mathematics courses over the duration of a fifteen-week semester (n=6964 posts). We apply our previously developed multifactor discussion board metric to compare differences in student participation, quantities of student posts, quality of posts, extent of threading, and instructor presence in small group and whole class discussion board activities. Results from this study indicate that small group discussions contained greater levels of student participation, greater quantities of posts per student and greater numbers of educationally valuable (content-related) posts per student as compared to whole class discussions within these courses. Interestingly, small group discussions contained a greater proportion of less educationally valuable posts as compared to whole class discussions.

For the past two years, the Center for Distance Learning of S U N Y Empire State College has been offering courses to "EX employees using the company's videoconferencing equipment. Students were located at four sites and two-hour seminars were held every other week throughout the term. This article discusses my incorporating problem-based learning and cooperative learning into the teaching of Business Mathematics and Introduction to Issues in Telecommunications for the Center for Distance Learning using this equipment. Students at each site were placed in teams of four and these groups engaged in cooperative learning activities at their sites in addition to participating over the network. Benefits of this approach have included: more variety of participation; increased insight in contributions made over the network because of time given to articulating ideas less formally at each site; and an atmosphere of sharing and teamwork.