An Analysis of Faculty Promotion of Critical Thinking and Peer Interaction within Threaded Discussions

Belcher, Alan; Hall, Barbara M.; Kelley, Kathleen M.; Pressey, Keith L.

doi:10.24059/olj.v19i4.544

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Arnold & Pistilli, 2014). Based on work by Belcher, Hall, Kelley, and Pressey (2015), another way instructors can encourage students to become thread starters is to praise them for posting a top-level comment and to summarize the content of these posts within the thread. These strategies could potentially motivate students to initiate top-level comments and think more critically about them, as they know their top-level posts will be attended to by the instructor.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Comparing the Factors That Predict Completion and Grades Among For-Credit and Open/MOOC Students in Online Learning

Almeda

Zuech²,

Utz

et al. 2018

OLJ

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Online education continues to become an increasingly prominent part of higher education, but many students struggle in distance courses. For this reasonFor this reason, there has been considerable interest in predicting which students will succeed in online courses , achieving poor grades or dropping out prior to course completionn). Effective intervention depends on understanding which students are at-risk in terms of actionable factors, and behavior within an online course is one key potential factor for intervention. In recent years, many have suggested that Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are a particularly useful place to conduct research into behavior and interventions, given both their size and the relatively low consequences/costs of experimentation. However, it is not yet clear whether the same factors are associated with student success in open courses such as MOOCs as in for-credit course -- an important consideration before transferring research results between these two contexts. While there has been considerable research in each context, differences between course design and population limit our ability to know how broadly findings generalize; differences between studies may have nothing to do with whether students are taking a course for-credit or as a MOOC. Do , this body of literature has been split into two-subcategories: research on success in MOOCs and research on success in For-credit courses. Few studies Few studies have attempted tohave attempted to understand how students and their learning experiences differ between these contexts, bypassing an opportunity to synthesize findings across different student populations who engage in online education. Do bypassing an opportunity to synthesize findings across different populations who engage in online education. To address this issue, we Do learners behave the same way in MOOCs and for-credit courses? AAre the implications for learning different, even for the exact same behaviors? In this paper, we study these issues through developing models that predict student course success from online interactions, in an online learning platform that caters to both distinct student groups (i.e., students who enroll on a for-credit or a non-credit basis). Our findings indicate that our models perform well enough to predict students’ course grades for new students across both of our populations. Furthermore, models trained on one of the two populations were able to generalize to new students in the other student population. We find that features related to comments were good predictors of student grade for both groups. Models generated from this research can now be used by instructors and course designers to identify at-risk students both for-credit and MOOC learners, towards providing both groups with better support.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These strategies could potentially motivate students to initiate top-level comments and think more critically about them, as they know their top-level posts will be attended to by the instructor. These instructor behaviors have also been found to promote higher levels of critical thinking within peer interactions (Belcher et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing the Factors That Predict Completion and Grades Among For-Credit and Open/MOOC Students in Online Learning

Almeda

Zuech²,

Utz

et al. 2018

OLJ

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“…First, peer facilitation is thought to engage students at a deeper cognitive level. The reduced involvement of the instructor requires students to take ownership of high-level cognitive processes, such as synthesizing and summarizing content, challenging and negotiating ideas, relating course content to personal experiences, and posing meaningful questions (Belcher, Hall, Kelley, & Pressey, 2015). Second, peer facilitation reduces the instructor's "authoritarian presence" in the discourse (Rourke & Anderson 2002, p. 4), thereby fostering more open, authentic discussion among students.…”

Section: Facilitation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student Actions and Community in Online Courses: The Roles Played By Course Length and Facilitation Method

Epp

Phirangee

Hewitt

2017

OLJ

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Fostering a strong sense of community among students within online courses is essential to supporting their learning experience. However, there is little consensus about how different facilitation methods influence students' sense of community or behaviors. This lack of understanding means instructors do not have the information they need to select an appropriate facilitation method when teaching online. This challenge is further complicated by a poor sense of how community building is influenced by the length of an online course. To better understand the relationship between these factors, we explored students' sense of community across four graduate-level online courses. Two of these courses employed an instructor-led form of facilitation and two employed a peer-led form of facilitation. For each facilitation method, one course lasted an entire term (12 weeks) and the other lasted half a term (6 weeks). This two-by-two betweensubjects design is augmented with interview data. This design enabled the study of both variables and possible interaction effects. The findings revealed students in instructor-facilitated courses experienced a stronger sense of community. Longer courses were also associated with a stronger sense of community, although the relationship was weaker than that of facilitation. No interaction effects were detected between facilitation method and course length. Follow-up analyses examined the relationship between facilitation style, course length, and a set of twelve student behaviors (e.g., note writing, note reading, and replying). The results revealed that both facilitation style and course length were associated with differences in students' note attributes including note length, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the text, and the frequency of their replies. Collectively, these findings offer evidence that both facilitation style and course length are related to students' sense of community and the behaviors they exhibit online.

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“…Others question whether the instructor should facilitate online discussions, because they feel it may be too time-consuming to oversee discussions properly and may unintentionally develop discussions that center on the instructor's comments (Correia & Baran, 2010;Light, Nesbitt, Light, & White, 2000). As a result, peer facilitation-in which students collaboratively control the discussions in an OLE (Bull, Greer, McCalla, & Kettel, 2001;Hew, 2015)-was proposed because students may increase their cognitive engagement when they recognize that their instructor is less engaged (Belcher, Hall, Kelley, & Pressey, 2014), and they may feel more comfortable asking for help, discussing their experiences, challenging and negotiating ideas, and sharing their views in a peer-facilitated online discussion rather than an instructor-led one (Bull, Greer, McCalla, & Kettel, 2001). According to Clarke and Bartholomew (2014), research on the role of the instructor has been inconsistent; they argue that discussions should be moderated, but how much moderation is needed from the instructor and the extent to which the instructor's participation matters is unclear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Relationships between Facilitation Methods, Students’ Sense of Community and Their Online Behaviours

Phirangee

Epp

Hewitt

2016

OLJ

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The popularity of online learning has boomed over the last few years, pushing instructors to consider the best ways to design their courses to support student learning needs and participation. Prior research suggests the need for instructor facilitation to provide this guidance and support, whereas other studies have suggested peer facilitation would be better because students might feel more comfortable learning and challenging each other. Our research compared these two facilitation methods and discovered that students participated more in instructor-facilitated online courses where they wrote more notes, edited and reread notes more, and created more connections to other notes than students in peer-facilitated online courses. We identified student activity patterns and described differences in how those patterns manifest themselves based on the facilitation method that was used. Our findings also show that instructorfacilitated online courses had a stronger sense of community than peer-facilitated online courses.

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An Analysis of Faculty Promotion of Critical Thinking and Peer Interaction within Threaded Discussions

Cited by 18 publications

References 10 publications

Comparing the Factors That Predict Completion and Grades Among For-Credit and Open/MOOC Students in Online Learning

Comparing the Factors That Predict Completion and Grades Among For-Credit and Open/MOOC Students in Online Learning

Student Actions and Community in Online Courses: The Roles Played By Course Length and Facilitation Method

Exploring the Relationships between Facilitation Methods, Students’ Sense of Community and Their Online Behaviours

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