Questioning the Necessity of Nonacademic Social Discussion Forums within Online Courses

Abstract

George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, said that the great difficulty in education was to get experience out of ideas. Knowledge must be linked to experience, experience must evolve from socialization, and socialization must be the result of interaction within a community. The difficulty lies in the linkage of knowledge to socialization and process that connects the two. According to one researcher, “Educational practitioners and theorists have long recognized that education is a social activity where people make sense of information through interactions that support internalization and externalization. Unfortunately, applying a social theory of learning to the field of e-learning is challenging” (Amelung, 2007, p. 501).Within the online environment, social interactivity is a necessity to the formation of knowledge. Learning, in order to be truly affective, must embody a social element that nurtures an individual through the multiintelligences of a group while it also embraces and fosters an individual to recognize self-efficacy. The idea of successful learning within a social environment has been reiterated by educational theorists (Bandura, 1994; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Dewey, 1963; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Miller & Dollard, 1941; Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976; Vygotsky, 1978; Walther, 1996). Some researchers (Kerka, 1988; Stacey & Rice, 2002) have indicated the importance of providing time and activities for establishing social presence within a friendly online environment was a great way to build successful learning. Others (Tu & Corry, 2003), however, suggested that it is the instructor who provides the foundation and learning structures to guide learners through various learning experiences involving active social interaction by applying modern technology. Tu and Corry (2003) believed that true learning successful for the student was achieved when the instructor initiated the course with a definition of an online collaborative learning community and explained its purposes and expectations to motivate learners to sustain online learning collaboration throughout the course. If the design of an online course is well thought out, social presence naturally evolves from students' interactions and their consciously being aware of each other in the context of moving forward. This study suggests that the learning community creates its own semblance of social awareness when the design of the course is structured so that it forces the members of that learning community to do so. If there is a design that pushes the learner into the community of learners, socialization becomes an integrated part of the learning experience.While this study did not undermine the importance of socialization and learning, it did indicate that an online discussion forum dedicated only to socialization of students might not be a necessity. In this study, the research determined that even though the instructor designed the course with academic and optional discussion forums (the optional discussion forums were further divided into an optional nonacademic social discussion forum called “Woody's Place,” and two optional academic forums, called FAQ and Sharing Resources), students did not need to frequent the optional nonacademic discussion forum. The explanation for this stemmed from the course design and syllabus. Because the instructor had created a learning environment in which learning was not separated from the social context and interaction and collaboration were built into the context of the course and syllabus, learning and socialization took place during every interaction within this online course.An individual's ability to become engaged with a community of learners helps create a sense of social presence. By establishing a social presence, learners support each other in their quest for knowledge. This social presence created by the group enhances critical thinking within the community of learners. The study addressed the following questions:The purpose of this research was to examine the social interactions of the required academic discussion forums, the optional academic discussion forums, and the optional nonacademic social discussion forum to see whether different types of forums actually enhanced sense of social presence. The intent was to see if these forums contributed to a social sense of community, which was intended to enhance learning and broaden the individual's role in the community of learners.The course had 18 graduate students enrolled in this blended (face-to-face and online) instructional technology course. Of these students, 16 elected to participate in the research study. Participant names were replaced with blind-coded IDs to preserve subject anonymity. Students were required to take either the course for a master's in instructional technology or the course as an elective for other programs. Doctoral students were also enrolled in the course. Participation in the study was voluntary.The data sources were surveys, interviews, discussion forums, and reflection papers. A demographic survey, a preliminary discussion survey, and a postdiscussion survey were collected. The interviews were conducted within the first five weeks of the semester. The required academic discussion forum portion of the course consisted of six discussion forums that ran sequentially across the semester. In four of the discussion forums, the instructor prompted the discussions. In two of the discussion forums, each group read the material and proposed discussion questions related to case study issues to the other groups. Each group was responsible for posting a summary report in the discussion board area that described the set of cases studied, presented solutions, suggested questions or challenges, identified key ideas from the groups' discussions, and included references to readings and other sources. Members of each group were expected to work together with the groups' members to generate deeper levels of understanding and critical evaluation of the material under study. In all of these discussion forums, students related an outside source to the discussion threads.Students were required to assist and document their learning and to contribute to learning of others within the course. Students were informed that they should regularly check the discussion board online, and in order to achieve the maximum points per discussion topic, they were expected to participate in discussion during the course of the week and not just on the last day.In addition to the required discussion forums, students were given the option of participating in three optional forums. The first was an optional social discussion called “Woody's Place.” This was a virtual location for students to meet and talk about class, assignments, graduate study, and so forth. The instructor indicated that this was a place for students only and that the instructor would not enter unless invited. This was a nongraded aspect of the class and participation was voluntary. The second was an optional academic discussion forum called the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). This was a virtual location for students to ask academic or technical questions. Both the instructor and other students responded to questions in this forum. This was a nongraded aspect of the class and participation was voluntary. The third optional forum was an optional academic discussion forum called Sharing Resources. This was a virtual location for students to share resources pertaining to the course. This was a nongraded aspect of the class and participation was voluntary as well.Reflection papers were used to assess the student's overall assessment of the course and the social interactions within the course. Each participant wrote four reflection papers at four separate designated dates during the course of the semester. The reflection papers asked the participants to reflect on the unit by answering one (or more) of the following phrases: I never knew that …; I never realized that …; I never thought of …; I never expected …; I appreciate that …; I need to learn …; I have a better understanding of …; and “implications of my learning.” Students were told that their reflection papers would be graded on one of the following criteria: reflection provides a description of change or growth in knowledge or understanding, with limited ideas or areas for future individual growth; reflection provides a description of change or growth in knowledge or understanding, with no information about future individual growth; reflection provides a limited description of change or growth in knowledge or understanding and no information about future individual growth The reflection was to be least one page in length and submitted on the due date.The data collected from the surveys were entered into Microsoft Excel (2003) for Windows and analyzed using SPSS 13.0, a survey research software program that assists in feedback collection, obtains high-quality data, and delivers focused, usable results. It was then analyzed using frequency tables that provided the number and percentage of responses answered for each question on the demographic survey, the preliminary discussion survey, and the post-discussion survey. The data from the interviews were transcribed into Microsoft Word and entered into Qualrus, a qualitative analysis software program that used intelligent computational strategies to assist with coding, analyzing, and applying qualitative research.I began by entering word processing files containing transcripts of interviews, field notes from observations, discussion forums from Blackboard, and reflection papers. I continued by identifying specific segments of text, such as quotes from interviews, and then assigned codes to those segments. Initially, the codes were descriptive codes. Later, as the analysis progressed, I grouped segments with other similar segments and assigned more analytic codes reflecting substantive issues of the research questions. Ultimately, I grouped segments into broad categories reflecting theoretical issues such as social presence and community of inquiry bonding as demonstrated by the supporting literature. Because not everything could be expressed as a Boolean yes/no code, I also used and attribute-value list and open coding. The attribute-value list made it possible to code different entities having different characteristics in the same segment without ambiguity. For example, a text segment could include the codes, “interview question 1” and “optional discussion forum.” Because the codes typically did not exist in isolation, but had relationships to one another, the codes were linked according to association or causation. An example of this would be the linking of the phrase “affective indicator” to “emotion” or “paralanguage.” I used QTools, tools for performing analyses and a categorizing tool to identify evolving categories into different stacks, sorting segments into stacks and assigning codes to each stack.The transcripts from the bulletin boards were anonymous and coded to capture social communications among online participants. In coding processes, I captured each message from the bulletin boards and coded it. The coding was adapted from other studies involving social presence templates (Christenson & Menzel, 1998; Cutler, 1995; Eggins & Slade, 1997; Gorham, 1988; Poole, 2000; Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 1999; Sanders & Wiseman, 1990; Swan, 2002).The methodological coding of the discussion forum transcripts followed the context of transcript analysis. I chose to use etic knowledge rather than emic knowledge because it relied on the extrinsic concepts and categories that had meaning. Because the logical fallacy of words out of context fails to infer an individual's true intention and meaning, I chose to delve beneath the surface of the individual postings, linking and coding each message not only to the previous and past thread, but also linking and coding to statements made by the participants during the interviews. In addition, I linked and coded the reflection papers, as they were written in conjunction with each unit of study, to the discussion forums. The coding that resulted generated a rich-textured dialogue laced with innuendos and suppositions concerning perceptions of social presence. It also echoed the plausibility of creative interpretations as was examined in Holsti's theory of interpretive analysis which stated, “the investigator is free to use all his powers of imagination and intuition to draw meaningful conclusions from the data” (1969, pp. 12). I patterned the coding of the transcripts after the studies of others whose analysis deduced that both an inductive and deductive approach to discussion forum analysis was useful (Garrison & Archer, 2001; Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson, 1997; Henri, 1992; Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).I used a coding scheme from Swan, Polhemus, Shih, and Rogers (2001), Rourke et al. (1999) and Swan (2002). In addition, however, I developed open coding that was only relevant to this study. I did use the identical indicator responses as Swan et al. (2001) had used. These researchers had identified affective indicators as personal expressions of emotions, feelings, beliefs, and values. Just as Swan (2002) had indicated that these affective indicators might be thought of as methods of projecting personal intimacy/social presence into online discourse as a way of making up for the absence of gestures, facial expressions, and/or intonation in face-to-face communication, I coded the affective indicator responses as paralanguage, emotion, value, humor, and selfdisclosure. Like Swan et al. (2001), I identified cohesive indicators as verbal immediacy behaviors that build a sense of group commitment or group presence/immediacy and coded these indicators as Swan (2002) did, as greetings and salutations, vocatives, group references, social sharing, and course reflection. Finally, just as Swan et al. (2001) identified interactive indicators as evidence that the other is attending and supporting communication, I also used Swan's (2002) method for coding the interactive indicator responses as acknowledgement, agreement/disagreement, approval, invitation, and personal advice.The summary of the data resulted in these findings. The participants described the optional forums as good in theory, but they did not have the level of contribution in practice. More participants posted to the required forums than to the optional forums. Even though there was a disparity in the number of posting between the two different forums, the repeated pattern of social interaction was present in both types of forums. According to the data collected, the participants used all three indicators—affective, cohesive, and interactive—and the full range of responses for each indicator. Taken together, the numbers of repeated patterns in affective, cohesive, and interactive indicators were not significantly different across the required and optional forums. Another interesting finding was that the participants were not able to verbalize exactly what social presence was within the online environment, yet according to the coded responses of FAQ and Sharing Resources and “Woody's Place, the perception of social presence existed. The level of teaching (instructor as a facilitator) presence was high in the FAQ and Sharing Resources but it was nonexistent in “Woody's Place.”From the beginning of the course to the end of the course, with the preliminary and post surveys, participants who indicated the highest levels of social interaction also indicated the highest level of satisfaction. This is consistent with Holmberg (1989), who demonstrated that it is the teacher's availability and commitment, not technological solutions, which guarantee student-teacher interaction. The concept of the instructor as a facilitator was an important component that linked to the perceived success of the participants in this study. For this reason, I believed that the participants frequented the FAQ and Sharing Resources more than “Woody's Place” because they knew that the instructor would reply. There was high cognitive presence in the FAQ and Sharing Resources, but there was little or no cognitive presence in “Woody's Place.”Abbott Lowell, an American educator and former president of Harvard University, said, “Too much attention has been paid to making education attractive by smoothing the path as compared with inducing strenuous voluntary effort” (Goodman, 1997, p. 233). Perhaps this is true. Perhaps as educators, we have concentrated on making education social to smooth over the voluntary effort, whereas we should have concentrated on making it academic and allowed the smoothing effect of the naturally evolving social element to follow. This study suggests that the course designer does not have to include a separate place for social presence, but rather needs to build the social element into the course design and syllabus. While a forum dedicated only to student socialization appears useful, in actuality, students innately recognize the instructor as a facilitator and gravitate toward the expertise of this individual to verify interactions and learning through collaboration. According to the results of this study, it is not the presence of a special social place that lends meaning and promotes learning online, but rather it is the design for communication and interaction that are related to social presence and ultimate student satisfaction in learning.Within any classroom, there are two types of dialogue: academic and social. The academic and nonacademic discussion forums studied in this research contributed to a social sense of community. Knowing that students within an online course cannot always recognize or achieve social presence, the intent of the instructor was to create another avenue that might beneficially aid the student with the social interaction among his or her peers. Academic dialogue refers to the intellectual conversation generated by readings and the readings' ancillary components. Social dialogue refers to the conversation that results from the conversations within any given group. When the interactions of academic dialogue are teamed with interactions of social dialogue, the result is a sense of social presence.Contrast this with a third type of dialogue: conversational social dialogue. If socializing is the process of converting and adapting to the needs of a society, then conversational social dialogue is simply the conversation that one engages in to enter into the group. This conversational social dialogue has no bearing on academic or social academic dialogue. An analogy to this can be made through the game of double dutch jump rope. Double dutch is playing jump rope with two ropes and two people turning the ropes simultaneously. While the jump-roping is going on, the two people turning the ropes often recite rhymes in rhythm. In Double dutch, each “jumper” carefully eyes the ropes, swaying back and forth with either the eyes or the body, in order to fall into the cadence of the rhythm and join the movement of the ropes. This is similar to a conversation, as an individual attempts to enter a conversation by waiting for the exact moment to join in. The initial conversation may be simplistic, but in time, the conversation of the becomes on the this the instructor meaningful dialogue and set the of the class by two required academic discussion forums and the optional discussion forums. For both discussion forums, the were and read and the instructor to be participants responded according to using both academic and social academic dialogue. This was through the instructor in the course the participants through their interviews and reflection papers that the dialogue was and the assessment that the was optional nonacademic social discussion forum up a location for students to in conversational social dialogue. I that the participants did not frequent the nonacademic social discussion forum as often as the academic forum because they had a level of social interaction to social presence in the required academic discussion forums. In they had a purpose within the course. This was to learn the material and course was not to even though believed that socialization was a element of the theorists conversation or dialogue with to within their have been as of between and socialization, where in it needs to be a between and recognized that former of learning by do not the learners within the academic they must also learn that of learning only through socialization do not learners in the academic A between academic and social in a is is a process in which one with others toward an intellectual is the process of in or is the process of converting and adapting to the needs of a and socializing place within the online community when one learning becomes the of a any one of the three but rather the three into a course the success of any online course can be