8 research outputs found
Talk with me: Student behaviours and pronoun use as indicators of discourse health across facilitation methods
Identifying which online behaviours and interactions are associated with students’ perception of being supported will enable a deeper understanding of how those activities contribute to student learning experiences. Features of student language, especially verbally immediate behaviours, are one of the aspects of student interactions in need of greater exploration within discourse-based online learning environments. As a result, the verbally immediate behaviour of pronoun usage is explored within online courses where the primary learning mechanism is student discourse. Student posting behaviours and features of their language, specifically their use of different classes of pronouns, are explored from the perspective of how supported students felt in their courses as well as how their behaviours and pronoun usage changed over time. Findings suggest that students who were taking instructor-facilitated courses felt more supported which was associated with higher levels of interaction and increased consistency in student behaviours from week to week within the term. Those enrolled in peer-facilitated courses, who felt less supported, used pronouns differently than those who experienced greater levels of support, suggesting the potential for pronoun-based analytics
The Interplay Between Students’ Usage of Pronouns and Community Levels in Online Courses
Presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, USA.This study examined the relationship between sense of community and pronoun usage in online courses that utilized computer mediated communication (CMC) to enable discussion. Using Rovai’s (2002) Classroom Community Scale (CCS), we compared pronoun use in three High CCS courses to that in three Low CCS courses. Results revealed students in High CCS courses used proportionally more pronouns, made proportionally more self-references, and used a higher proportion of collective pronouns. Instructors from High CCS courses encouraged students to share personal perspectives, which appears to have promoted a greater sense of connectivity amongst learners. This behaviour explains the differences in pronoun usage and suggests that pronoun-based analytics may be a useful indicator of students’ sense of community
Student actions and community in online courses: The roles played by course length and facilitation method
Fostering a strong sense of community among students within online courses is essential to supporting their learning experience. However, there is little consensus about how different facilitation methods influence students’ sense of community or behaviours. This lack of understanding means instructors do not have the information they need to select an appropriate facilitation method when teaching online. This challenge is further complicated by a poor sense of how community building is influenced by the length of an online course. To better understand the relationship between these factors, we explored students’ sense of community across four graduate-level online courses. Two of these courses employed an instructor-led form of facilitation and two employed a peer-led form of facilitation. For each facilitation method, one course lasted an entire term (12 weeks) and the other lasted half a term (6 weeks). This two-by-two between-subjects design enabled the study of both variables and possible interaction effects. The findings revealed students in instructor-facilitated courses experienced a stronger sense of community. Longer courses were also associated with a stronger sense of community, although the relationship was weaker than that of facilitation. No interaction effects were detected between facilitation method and course length. Follow-up analyses examined the relationship between facilitation style, course length, and a set of twelve student behaviors (e.g., note writing, note reading, and replying). The results revealed that both facilitation style and course length were associated with differences in the length of students’ notes, the grade level of their text, and the frequency of their replies. Collectively, these findings offer evidence that both facilitation style and course length are related to students’ sense of community and the behaviors they exhibit online