Paper Info
Title
Some observations from the analysis of an online discussion board
Abstract
Many educators and educational institutions include an online discussion forum in the content management system supporting their courses, because they think such tool facilitates the instructional process. It could be true if we explicitly design the instructional process to take advantage of this tool, but to do so we have to better understand how users actually use online discussion boards. Trying to answer such a question this paper presents a study of discussions occurring in several undergraduate courses in computer science offered by the University of Chile. More specifically, the study was based on the semantic analysis of a representative set of messages registered in eight different courses occurring in a period of two years. The obtained results indicate that the users do not perceive the forum as a learning tool, but as a communication platform that allows them to socialize and address coordination and operative issues related with the courses.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/ICSMC.2012.6377909
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
computer aided instruction,computer science education,content management,educational institutions,University of Chile,computer science,content management system,educational institutions,instructional process,learning tool,online discussion board,semantic analysis,undergraduate courses,communication,coordination,online discussion board,semantic analysis of messages,social interaction
Conference
1062-922X
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-1712-2
2
0.36
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sergio F. Ochoa182393.70
José A. Pino278289.55
Nelson Baloian327146.73
Pedro Antunes438948.75
Valeria Herskovic522423.12