Assessing Online Discussion Forum Participation

As a socially constructive learning tool, discussion forums remain central to online education. They have continued to evolve in functionality, acquiring ever-increasing usability features. However, development has lagged in providing instructors the means to assess student work in forums. The author submits an overview of his software program that provides instructors with the means to evaluate forum work quickly, easily, and repeatedly. The software accomplishes this by accessing the forums\u27 underlying database, searching for manifest and latent data, and calculating data associated with an array of metrics. This is a Web-based tool built on Open Source and standards-based languages, providing opportunities to port the program to numerous Learning Management Systems. It is the intention of this author to provide this tool, when completed, for such use as a free, Open Source tool. Interested parties may e-mail the author for progress updates. Currently, however, further work on the project must await the completion of another project, the author\u27s dissertatio

Online scaffolding through asynchronous online discussion forum

Since the last decade, the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), brings a lot of changes to nearly every fields of life including management, entertainment, financial, and legislation (Mohd Fuad, 2014). With internet, humans have access to infinite knowledge and communication can be made to people across the globe with just a few clicks. The immense potential of internet creates interest for the educators to take advantage and implement online communication in educational setting

Students Language Production In Online Discussion Forum

This research aims to find out the types of sentence structures used by the students in their language production in Ontell, and sentence structure errors commonly made by the students. The subjects of this research were third semester students of English Education Study Program. There were 26 students who actively involved in the discussion forum. The data were derived through students postings in discussion forum. There were 648 total sentences produced by the overall students. The data revealed that in factthe students produced various types of sentence structures. The majority of sentences posted by the students were simple sentence and complex sentence with 34,72% and 42,28% respectively. Furthermore, the data showed that the biggest problem with sentence structures was run-on sentence. In many cases, students tended to misplace punctuation between two independent clauses. This contributed 60,51% of total errors

Web-based learning environment based on students’ needs

Traditional learning needs to be improved since it does not involve active learning among students. Therefore, in the twenty-first century, the development of internet technology in the learning environment has become the main needs of each student. One of the learning environments to meet the needs of the teaching and learning process is a web-based learning environment. This study aims to identify the characteristics of a webbased learning environment that supports students’ learning needs. The study involved 542 students from fifteen faculties in a public higher education institution in Malaysia. A quantitative method was used to collect the data via a questionnaire survey by randomly. The findings indicate that the characteristics of a web-based learning environment that support students’ needs in the process of learning are online discussion forum, lecture notes, assignments, portfolio, and chat. In conclusion, the students overwhelmingly agreed that online discussion forum is the highest requirement because the tool can provide a space for students and teachers to share knowledge and experiences related to teaching and learning

Genre repertoire in Online Discussion Forum: A case from Thailand

An online discussion forum becomes more significant in facilitating people to share opinions. Companies must understand how consumers use the online forum. We study an influential online discussion forum in Thailand, Pantip.com, in order to classify user behaviours in the cosmetic discussion forum. We adopt the concept of genre and genre repertoire to assist our content analysis. We analyse 77 discussion threads, which contain a “cosmetic” keyword during a 6-week period in late 2014. Our preliminary analysis shows that the genre repertoire found on Pantip.com consists of three genres: (1) Information sharing, (2) Opinion discussion, and (3) Question asking. A theoretical contribution from this study is that we show how genre theory can be used to describe an online discussion forum, and a practical contribution is that business companies could adopt the insights generated to form their communication practices to customers, which are inline with existing genres

INTEGRATION OF FACEBOOK MESSENGER IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASSROOM: LEARNERS’ ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate learners’ attitudes and perceptions toward the integration of online discussion forum via Facebook Messenger into the EFL/ literature classroom.  Methodology: For this research, a convenience sampling method was used to collect 45 samples through a questionnaire to gauge learners’ attitudes and perceptions of using the online discussion forum for learning the literature from those who are incorporated for group discussions on the course’s prescribed novel, Lord of the Flies. The research data was analyzed for descriptive statistics using SPSS version 20. Main Findings: The results of the experimental study revealed that the respondents’ positive attitudes towards the integration of ODF (Overall Mean = 4.03, SD = 0.84) and perceptions on the effects of online discussion forum on learning the novel were revealed (Overall Mean = 3.99, SD = 0.87). Thus, this study proposes an online discussion forum as an invaluable element to enhance the teaching of the literature component in the EFL classroom. Applications: This study proposes ODF as an invaluable element to enhance the teaching of the literature component in the EFL/ ESL classroom based on the learners’ positive attitudes and perceptions. It is conducted at the University of Anbar in Iraq. Undergraduate EFL learners who were enrolled in the English language course at the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities participated in the study. It can be used by literary students, from universities and other literary centers. Novelty: Industrial revolution 4.0 requires a shift from face-to-face lecture approach to a technology-enhanced environment whereby learners can take responsibility for their own learning through collaboration, critical discussion, and negotiation. Taking up this challenge, online discussion forum (ODF) via Facebook Messenger was first introduced into the EFL literature classroom at the University of Anbar, Iraq to replace the predominantly used traditional approach

"cba to check the spelling" investigating parser performance on discussion forum posts

We evaluate the Berkeley parser on text from an online discussion forum. We evaluate the parser output with and without gold tokens and spellings (using Sparseval and Parseval), and we compile a list of problematic phenomena for this domain. The Parseval f-score for a small development set is 77.56. This increases to 80.27 when we apply a set of simple transformations to the input sentences and to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) training sections

Exploring The Influences on Cyber Education in a Bilingual Higher Institution

This paper presents the research study which explores the variables influencing the learning effectiveness of the students taking an online introductory information technology course in cyber education in a bilingual higher education institution in Hong Kong. These variables are: (1) student's English proficiency, (2) instructor's guidance in an online discussion forum and (3) peer students' collaboration in an online discussion forum. Correlation analysis was adopted to identify whether any of these variables could be potential factors on the students 'learning performance while multiple regression analysis was performed to explore the combined effect of these variables on the students' learning performance. Validity and reliability of this research study are highlighted in this paper. Finally, the research findings are discussed