Categories of questions in an online discussion forum: An analysis

Author

Zhao, Jianhua ; Jiang, Yinjian

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. Technol. in Educ., South China Normal Univ., Guangzhou, China

fYear

2010

fDate

24-27 Aug. 2010

Firstpage

428

Lastpage

431

Abstract

The online discussion forum is a common means of learning for CSCL, because participants can share or exchange their understandings, viewpoints, comments, or critiques of a certain task or solving problems with it. The results of analysing the contents of online discussion forums could describe the characteristics of online discussions. In this study, the 20 undergraduate students registered in a course - “Computer in Education” and participated in the relevant group activities. Their postings in a web-based learning environment are analysed for exposing how students communicated each other demonstrated in the categories of questions. The coding scheme of this study was proposed by Graesser and Person. The results illustrate that the characteristics of the discussion forum.

Keywords

Internet; computer aided instruction; computer science education; educational courses; encoding; CSCL; Web-based learning; coding scheme; computer education; education course; online discussion forum; undergraduate students; Computers; Courseware; Discussion forums; Encoding; Message systems; Monitoring; CSCL; Discussion forum; content analysis; online discussion; online learning;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Science and Education (ICCSE), 2010 5th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Hefei

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-6002-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCSE.2010.5593591

Filename

5593591