Facilitating Online Learning Conversations : Exploring tool affordances in higher education

Abstract

This dissertation aims to facilitate students’ online learning conversations in higher education, using asynchronous online forum discussion. Despite offering a great learning potential, online discussions also present several obstacles for conducting effective learning conversations. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the question how to facilitate students’ online learning conversations, by manipulating the affordances of online discussion tools. This facilitation is aimed in particular at the degree in which students’ conversations are meaning-oriented and interactionally coherent. In the first study, a system for “anchored discussion” is compared with a system for traditional forum discussion (Blackboard), and their collaborative and communicative affordances for the collaborative processing of academic texts are investigated. Compared to face-to-face conversations, online conversations offer a reduced conversational “context” which may hinder collaborative learning processes. Anchored discussion strengthens this context by providing a document under discussion and enabling users to anchor their messages in specific passages of the document. Results show that students’ conversation in the system for anchored discussion is more directed at a constructive processing of the meaning of texts than in the traditional forum, which is more oriented towards a more debate-like sharing of personal opinions and experiences. In addition, while messages in the traditional forum resemble usual discussion or email conversation and contain social and regulative comments, discussion in the system for anchored discussion is seen to be more efficient and “to-the-point”. We conclude that for collaborative text comprehension by undergraduate students, anchored discussion might be more suitable than traditional forum discussion. The second study investigates the use of an evaluation function to increase the local relevance of replies in online anchored discussion. In a university course on French linguistics, a regular system for anchored discussion is compared with two versions that are enhanced with an integrated evaluation function. The function asks students to evaluate the relevance of each others’ replies. To compare between experimental and control conditions, the collaboration protocols are analyzed with a newly developed coding scheme for the local relevance of replies. Results indicate that an evaluation function can effectively increase the local relevance of students’ replies, but only if it is actually used to a certain extent. Using the evaluation function is hypothesized to increase students’ awareness of the importance of writing relevant replies. The third study investigates the nature, reception, and use of online peer feedback in different contexts and tools in higher education. Results show that feedback with concrete suggestions for revisions are most being applied, which may be because they give the receivers the best and most direct lead for a potential change. This study also shows the potential value of using anchored discussion for facilitating online peer feedback, as it seems to elicit less evaluative remarks and more suggestions for revisions, than the Blackboard environment. In sum, anchored discussion has shown to be a versatile tool with many possible uses that concern the discussion of online materials or the interactive exchange of peer feedback and we encourage further research and development on the subject.