Some observations from the analysis of an online discussion board

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.