An analysis tool for the assessment of student participation and implementation dynamics in online discussion forums

Abstract

In order to conduct a successful online forum it is necessary to have a collection of proven provocative discussion topics, a sound technique to implement them, and a consistent way to assess student participation. In this paper I present an analysis tool that helps me evaluate individual student participation, the viability of the forum cases, and their success/failure of their execution. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the ANGEL learning system in use by my university, a review of techniques to promote, facilitate, and assess participation. This is followed by a description of the analysis tool, its operation, and factors that it measures. The paper concludes with lessons learned and opportunities for future work.

The Impact of Time Delay on the Content of Discussions at a Computer- Mediated Ergonomics Conference

“…Considering that the mean, median and mode of Proportion of a discussion thread where the highest Time delay occurred were 71%, 75% and 100% respectively, it can be seen that the termination of many discussion threads happened once the greatest time delay between postings had just occurred. Therefore, Pendergast's (2006) proposal that as time delays within discussions extended, so participation is negatively impacted and interaction decreases, is confirmed. This could perhaps also be attributed to the fact that the contributors were losing interest in the discussion or had interacted sufficiently within the discussion to the extent that their statements had been made and their questions answered.…”

“…were investigated. It has been suggested that limiting the time frames and parameters for computer-mediated discussion threads and the replies within these discussion threads would improve interactivity and social presence (Pendergast, 2006;Tu, 2002). This study tends to contradict those suggestions as Knowledge construction, Social aspects and the Number of words were generated independently within postings, and not related to the time delay between the original posting and subsequent responses.…”

Computer-Managed Instruction (CMI)-Based Online Forums

“…Grading the online discussion postings manually could take up more than 50% of teachers' time for each online class (Lazarus, 2003). In most cases, teachers have to manually read all the individual discussion postings and assess and comment on them (Pendergast, 2006). In the present study, the authors demonstrate the possibility of incorporating the computer-managed instruction (CMI) model into the implementation of an online forum in order to reduce the time in managing students' online participation.…”

“…The messages are analyzed along SCAFFOLD (Dringus & Ellis, 2004) to reflect the depth of students' knowledge. The assessment criteria for online participation used in this study are timeliness of postings (Knowlton, 2001;Pendergast, 2006;Sahu, 2008), categories of postings using SCAFFOLD (Dringus & Ellis, 2004), number of discussions posted, and length of postings. It should be noted that the assessment criteria used in this study are not intended to represent superior criteria as compared to other techniques or frameworks in the literature.…”

An Approach to Measure Student Activity in Learning Management Systems

“…We have found few papers directly related to measuring student activity in LCMS, among these are: Pendergast (2006) describes a tool independent from the LCMS that allows instructors to assess the activity of the students exclusively in the use of forums. The formula is quantitative with weight assigned to the number of sent messages, the number of received and the length of the messages though it also includes a qualitative part that the instructor establishes once he or she has read the messages.…”