4 research outputs found
Teacher Presence in Asynchronous Discussion Forums: Effects on the Level of Higher Education Students’ Interaction A study of Saudi context
Currently, the number of higher education institutions utilising asynchronous online discussion forums (DFs) to support the interaction between students and their instructors is dramatically increasing. Teacher presence in the DFs has a crucial role in shaping student interaction; therefore, many scholars have attempted to investigate its impact on the level of students’ interaction. However, little research has scrutinised how the type and frequency of teachers’ contributions impact the level of student interaction using both qualitative and quantitative methods. For that reason, the researcher was eager to examine this impact by means of integrating the aforementioned methods in a Saudi context.
A quasi- experimental methodology was applied to investigate the impact of the frequency and the types teacher’s contributions on the level of the students’ participation in the DFs. The researcher used the content analysis approach to see what types of the teacher’s posts impacted students’ interaction in the DFs. Data were collected through online observation (discussion forums’ transcripts) and from the students’ interviews.
The researcher achieved some useful findings which hoped to prove helpful to readers, and especially educators, as this study is concerned with providing guidance to the teachers with regard to the extent to which instructor intervention is required to effectively encourage student participation and learning in the DFs.
The findings show that the teacher’s presence in the DFs increased students’ interaction and decreased the amount of independent messages. Thus occurred because the teacher created an engagement, encouragement environment in the DFs. Further findings demonstrate that the different types of teacher’s posts in the DFs influenced the level of student interaction. Instructional design and organisation posts, facilitating discourse posts, encouraged students’ contributions. While the Direct instruction posts which included corrective feedback posts led to a decrease in the level of participation. In addition, the teacher’s presence in the DFs negatively impacted the level of student-to-student interaction since the students were focused on their teacher’s posts and directed their contributions toward her. In the presence of the teacher, the students did not attempt
III
to offer solutions for the issues their classmates faced, as they were worried they would undertake the teacher’s role when she was present. However, when the teacher invited all participants to provide their help to one of their classmates, peer-to-peer interaction significantly increased
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The Go-GN Open Research Handbook
This Handbook draws together work done between 2020 and 2023 by members of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). GO-GN is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education. GO-GN is currently funded through the OER programme of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and administered by the Open Education Research Hub from the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK.
In our current phase of activity, we began these collaborative writing efforts with a Research Methods Handbook which was created during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Working together at distance provided an important way to strengthen community links when meeting in person was not possible. The Research Methods Handbook was well received by a much larger audience than we anticipated, and went on to win an Open Research Award. We followed this up with a sister publication, our Conceptual Frameworks Guide. This explores a less well traversed (but nonetheless important) area of scholarly focus. Together, these two explore open approaches to the theory and practice of research in open education. One distinctive feature of our presentation is to foreground the authentic experiences of doctoral researchers who have used specific approaches in researching open education. While it is not possible to cover all approaches in this detail, we hope that important insights are presented in this form of open practice.
Throughout 2020-2022 we also regularly engaged our membership through collective reviews of recently published papers and articles. The Research Reviews serve as an overview of recent research but also as a snapshot of the critical responses recorded by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers working in relevant areas.
No one volume can claim to comprehensively contain the diversity and variety of open approaches, and this is no exception. But one virtue of openness is that we can draw on the openly licensed works of others to increase our coverage of relevant areas. The Additional Resources at the end of this volume bring together a range of openly licensed texts on open education research and suggests places for further reading and research.
Consequently, the information contained here represents a wide range of contributors and collaborators. The original and intended audience for this volume is the doctoral student working on an open education research project - in short, the typical student member of GO-GN and the profile the network exists to support.
However, we’ve learned through feedback and analytics that the potential audience for works like this is much larger. Many people who wouldn’t describe themselves as researchers still do research and evaluation. Presenting accessible insights into research foundations and practices helps with this and can be understood as a form of open practice
Teacher Presence in Asynchronous Discussion Forums: Effects on the Level of Higher Education Students’ Interaction A study of Saudi context
Currently, the number of higher education institutions utilising asynchronous online discussion forums (DFs) to support the interaction between students and their instructors is dramatically increasing. Teacher presence in the DFs has a crucial role in shaping student interaction; therefore, many scholars have attempted to investigate its impact on the level of students’ interaction. However, little research has scrutinised how the type and frequency of teachers’ contributions impact the level of student interaction using both qualitative and quantitative methods. For that reason, the researcher was eager to examine this impact by means of integrating the aforementioned methods in a Saudi context.
A quasi- experimental methodology was applied to investigate the impact of the frequency and the types teacher’s contributions on the level of the students’ participation in the DFs. The researcher used the content analysis approach to see what types of the teacher’s posts impacted students’ interaction in the DFs. Data were collected through online observation (discussion forums’ transcripts) and from the students’ interviews.
The researcher achieved some useful findings which hoped to prove helpful to readers, and especially educators, as this study is concerned with providing guidance to the teachers with regard to the extent to which instructor intervention is required to effectively encourage student participation and learning in the DFs.
The findings show that the teacher’s presence in the DFs increased students’ interaction and decreased the amount of independent messages. Thus occurred because the teacher created an engagement, encouragement environment in the DFs. Further findings demonstrate that the different types of teacher’s posts in the DFs influenced the level of student interaction. Instructional design and organisation posts, facilitating discourse posts, encouraged students’ contributions. While the Direct instruction posts which included corrective feedback posts led to a decrease in the level of participation. In addition, the teacher’s presence in the DFs negatively impacted the level of student-to-student interaction since the students were focused on their teacher’s posts and directed their contributions toward her. In the presence of the teacher, the students did not attempt
III
to offer solutions for the issues their classmates faced, as they were worried they would undertake the teacher’s role when she was present. However, when the teacher invited all participants to provide their help to one of their classmates, peer-to-peer interaction significantly increased