How Much Is Enough? A Research Review of the Impact of Instructor Participation in Online Discussion

• Research
• Open Access
• Published: 04 December 2019

What to expect, and how to improve online word forums: the instructors' perspective

• Marco A. Gerosa²,
• Tayana U. Conte¹ &
• José Francisco de One thousand. Netto^ane

Journal of Internet Services and Applications volume 10, Article number:22 (2019) Cite this commodity

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Abstract

Online word forums are asynchronous communication tools that are widely used in Learning Direction Systems. However, instructors and students face various difficulties, and instructors lack a guide on what strategies they tin can employ to reach a more participatory forum environment. This work aims to identify benefits and difficulties of using online give-and-take forums from the instructors' point of view, and to provide a list of strategies and improvements that can mitigate the challenges and lead to a more participatory forum. We used coding procedures to analyze data nerveless through semi-structured interviews. The results of our exploratory analysis are relevant to the altitude learning community and tin can inform instructors, developers, and researchers to assistance them improve the quality of arbitration and use of forums.

Introduction

Since interaction is a central component in the quality of online learning [i], Learning Direction Systems and MOOCs frequently prefer asynchronous online discussion forums to foster interaction [2,3,iv]. Forums enable instructors to understand and intervene in learning activities [5, 6], and students have time to recall and codify answers. Individuals collaboratively build knowledge while collaborating in an asynchronous online environment [seven]. Therefore, a well-coordinated educational forum is a valuable tool to promote reflection on learning, share information and perspectives, and connect students [viii].

However, forums can feel both periods of inactivity and intermittent flurries of messages [nine]. Without acceptable feedback, only low levels of cognitive date occur, and students may experience isolated [ten]. Feeling isolated tin can result in limited participation or lack of depth and quality of the discussion [eleven].

While prior literature focuses on specific improvements to online give-and-take forums, or include a list of benefits, difficulties, and strategies alongside their principal results [11,12,xiii,14,fifteen,sixteen,17,18,19,20], no report has primarily focused on identifying benefits, difficulties, strategies, and possible improvements from the instructors' point of view. Understanding the perceptions of instructors is of import, since they work closely with a diverseness of students and accept a comprehensive view of the tool, which they use in multiple contexts.

Therefore, the goal of this work is to identify and categorize benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements for online word forums from the point of view of instructors who are experienced in calculating technology and/or distance learning via Internet. Cataloging benefits and difficulties is useful for novice instructors to know what to expect or to aim when mediating educational forums, while investigating strategies and improvements may assist instructors and tool designers to alleviate the difficulties and heighten the tool. To reach this goal, nosotros defined the post-obit research questions:

• RQ1. What benefits of using educational discussion forums are perceived by instructors?

• RQ2. What difficulties in using educational discussion forums are perceived past instructors?

• RQ3. What strategies do instructors use to mediate discussion forums?

• RQ4. What improvements can exist implemented in discussion forums according to the instructors?

To reply these enquiry questions, we conducted an exploratory qualitative study with instructors who piece of work in altitude learning. We collected data through semi-structured interviews and analyzed the data using Grounded-Theory procedures, cataloging and discussing a set of benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements.

Method

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 instructors who teach distance learning classes that use word forums. For information analysis, we used procedures of Grounded Theory [21]. Figure i presents the steps performed in our exploratory empirical study, which are detailed in the following subsections.

Fig. 1

Report overview. The figure presents the steps performed in the empirical study

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Selection of participants

To carry out the interviews, we invited instructors from different institutions who teach altitude learning classes that utilize discussion forums and who take experience with distance learning and/or computing applied science. In full, 12 instructors participated in the interview. All participants signed the Term of Free and Informed Consent. ^{Footnote 1} The instructors who participated in the interview and were considered "experienced instructors" have at least five years of experience with distance learning (Tabular array 1).

Table 1 Experience in altitude learning

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Amongst the instructors who participated, 2 accept more than 10 years of feel, every bit shown in Table 2. Their reports revealed needs that have been faced for years and have not been addressed. For case, I1 has more than ten years of feel and has already worked in distance learning courses as Coordinator, Instructor, and Monitor. In addition, I1 reported in the interview that in his undergraduate he participated as a pupil in distance learning courses.

Tabular array 2 Profile of the interviewees

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The instructors of the Institutions "A" and "C" use the forum to promote the give-and-take of the topics covered in the form and to promote collaboration amongst students. Instructors from institution B usually use the forum to ask questions and to provide warnings and reminders to students. In addition to using the forum for questions, I3 besides uses it to discuss the subjects taught in the course.

Table 3 presents information about the institutions and the LMS used.

Table three Profile of the institutions

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Establishment "A" provides periodic grooming for its instructors. In institutions B and C, the courses are semi-presential and the utilise of the forum is non mandatory, simply the instructors utilise the forum tool to discuss the subjects that are taught in the virtual environs.

Data drove

The questions of the interview script were organized into three categories: teacher profile, mediation, and perceptions nearly discussion forums. ^{Footnote 2} The categories aimed to assistance and direct the interviewer; however, the interviews did not necessarily follow the order of the categories. Tabular array 4 presents the questions that were used as guide for the profile category.

Tabular array 4 Questions related to instructor profile

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Table 5 presents questions related to practices of mediation in online forums focused on the structure of the forum, how mediation occurs, how the forum is used, etc. The questions related to the instructors' perceptions about the forum tool (Tabular array six) direct asked about difficulties, benefits, strategies, and improvements.

Table five Mediation category

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Table half-dozen Perception category

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We employed two cycles of interviews, transcriptions, and analysis. Ii researchers performed the transcriptions, as suggested by Runeson et al. [22], contributing to a improve understanding of the nerveless data. The interview transcriptions were imported into the Atlas.ti ^{Footnote 3} software. All the interviews' transcriptions and analysis were carried out in Portuguese, the native linguistic communication of the authors and interviewees.

Data analysis

We transcribed the interviews and analyzed them using procedures of the Grounded Theory method. According to Glaser and Strauss [21], Grounded Theory is a scientific method that uses a ready of systematic procedures of information collection and analysis to generate, elaborate, and validate substantive theories [23]. The emphasis of Grounded Theory is learning from the data rather than from an existing theoretical view [24].

According to Strauss and Corbin [25], Grounded Theory is based on the idea of coding to analyze the information. The coding procedure can be divided into three phases: open, axial, and selective coding. Open coding involves breaking, analyzing, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing the collected data and aims to give sense to it [25]. Figure 2a illustrates the open coding.

Fig. 2

The coding process. a Open coding: edifice codes and categories (adjusted from Santos [26]). b Centric coding process of research – Structural Difficulty

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After obtaining and transcribing the interviews, the investigator carefully examines the data and cuts out the units of analysis. Each unit of analysis is named with a word or judgement expressing its meaning for the investigator. The goal of open coding is to generate and validate properties and categories using abiding comparisons [24], which assistance the researchers to define a set of conditions to attain a category. Co-ordinate to Glaser [26], the researchers must apply the theoretical sensitivity to requite pregnant to the data and be able to separate what is relevant for the research.

With the divers categories, nosotros begin the axial coding phase, as depicted in Fig. 2b, which is a Chart Scheme of the associations betwixt the codes. The effigy presents the "Structural Difficulty" category and its subcategories.

Results

From the analysis of the interviews, we identified: a) benefits perceived past instructors, b) difficulties faced in give-and-take forums, c) strategies used by instructors, and d) improvements that can be fabricated to the forum tool. These results are discussed in the following subsections. In addition, to make it easier to understand the results, we have included the Nautical chart Scheme of the associations between the codes: benefits (Additional file one), difficulties (Boosted file 2) and improvements (Boosted file 3) and the mapping between benefits, difficulties , strategies and improvements (Additional file four).

RQ1. What benefits of using educational discussion forums are perceived by instructors?

We identified 4 categories of benefits from the instructors' perspective, every bit presented in Fig. three.

Fig. 3

Benefits Network. The figure presents the graphical representation of the benefits according to the instructors' interviews. Side by side to the image is a summary of the graphical representation

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The depth of the discussion – ID B1 (mentioned by instructors I1, I3, I7, I11) was reported as beneficial since forum participants have time to elaborate their answers and reflect on what they desire to post: "The conversations tend to be deeper, considering you lot see that message, reflect on it, and get a chance to meliorate work on your idea" I3.

Collaboration – ID B2 (mentioned past instructors I2, I4, I5, I6, I8, I11, I12) was reported by instructors equally a benefit, mainly due to the communication and cooperation perspectives. Co-ordinate to I5: "The forum is very of import every bit a collaborative activity tool."

Information record, ID B3 (mentioned past instructors I1, I7, I9, I10) was too appreciated past instructors. Co-ordinate to I1: "With the logs, everything stays on the platform. You lot know who is interacting with whom, which individuals are not participating, or disagreeing, and whether the participations are taking place in the spaces that should happen."

Finally, information visualization, ID B4 (mentioned by instructors I1, I2, I4, I5, I8, I11, I12) enables instructors to visualize pupil interactions and polemic topics, equally explained by I4: "Y'all tin can see what the students are debating, what are the well-nigh discussed subjects, identify who is participating and who is not interacting." The forum enables a in-depth discussion and tin can be used as a communication and monitoring tool for learning.

RQ2. What difficulties in using educational word forums are perceived by instructors?

We identified 19 types of difficulties from the interviews. These difficulties were grouped into three categories: forum structure, motivation, and accessory, every bit tin exist seen in Table 7.

Tabular array 7 Difficulties in online give-and-take forums

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The difficulties with the highest occurrences are D1, D6, D7, D13, D14, and D17, which involve difficulties related to the hierarchical structure of the forum. D1, Difficulties in post-obit the forum refer to the difficulties that instructors and students face to follow the discussion due to the loftier number of posts that occur in the tool. D6 and D7, Difficulties related to the construction of the forum, are the difficulties that involve the forum's interface. D13, Difficulties in motivating students, and D14, the forum is not a current tool, are related to the motivational factors that make up one's mind or influence educatee participation. Finally, the difficulty D17 relates to the fact that forum is not like social media; this difficulty is both structural and motivational. An bonny interface or the lack of information technology influences student participation. Many instructors reported that students feel unmotivated to participate in the forum because it does non expect similar current social media tools and websites, making forums seem like outdated tools.

The categories and difficulties that have been identified are discussed in particular below.

1. a)

   Difficulty with Forum Structure (DFS)

These are structural difficulties that relate to the structure of the forum and the lack of tools to support instructors' piece of work or students' interaction, as mentioned by I1 and I3. "The student does non understand very well the relations of the levels of the forum; for example, they have difficulty knowing whom they are responding to and how they are responding in the forum" [I1].

This difficulty was besides observed by Adetimirin [27], who states that many participants respond incorrectly or exercise not obey the structure set past the tool. Co-ordinate to Saramago [28], the use of a complex structure harms participation, since reading and writing become more difficult.

The forum interface as well poses difficulties. "As much as we encourage, they (students) barely use the forum, they communicate by other means (WhatsApp, Facebook). I tin practice this discussion, but I accept little feedback from the students." [I2]. The fact that the forum differs from social media interferes with student participation. "Students are accustomed to Facebook, they view the forum as a Facebook [...] students, and the instructor also misses the icons of the Facebook in the forum" [I8].

Less experienced instructors noted difficulties in visualizing letters, as mentioned by I6. Another difficulty oft cited by the instructors is the forum'southward hierarchical structure. According to I3, both he and the students have difficulties in posting their messages due to the structure of the forum: "Sometimes they (the students) do not know where to mail the messages. They do not know if they must reply in the principal message [...] sometimes they make improper alignments. They think they are responding to their colleague'southward bulletin, but they are responding to someone else's bulletin" [I3].

1. b)

   Lack of Incentive (LI)

Low pupil motivation to use the forum has been reported past many experienced instructors and is associated with the lack of features in the forum that can capture their attention. "The forum needs mediation, it needs motivation and that the instructor needs to promote the participation of the students; otherwise, pupil absence will predominate" [I7]. "Sometimes the student just reads the question in the forum and responds, oftentimes does not check the responses of other colleagues to contribute" [I5]. Many students prefer to utilize social media instead. I1 reported in his interview that he participated in forums equally a student, equally an instructor, and currently equally a coordinator and, according to him, the forum changed little and did not keep upwards with the current stride of asynchronous advice technology. "The biggest difficulty of the forum is that the social interaction that previously worked in the forum present is in the WhatsApp groups. We have a difficulty of interaction within the educational forum. The students used to exchange letters and communicate in a forum. Present it has been transformed into WhatsApp, and the distance learning platform is like a task surround" [I1].

1. c)

   Accompaniment Difficulty (Advert)

Many instructors detect it difficult to go on upwardly with the discussions taking identify on the forum. In full general, distance education courses count on a considerable number of participants and posts, and information technology can be difficult for instructors to follow the comments and provide prompt feedback. In the forum, the accessory by instructors is important for the progress of the discussion and the participation of students.

However, instructors lack tools to assist them in monitoring and evaluating activities, as mentioned by I3 and I4: "There is no statistics to know how each i (educatee) participated in the discussions or to know the contributions of each one" [I3], "Nosotros don't have a forum-specific report and the forum does not provide information such as which educatee answered a specific question type" [I4].

Curiously, less experienced instructors reported difficulties related to the lack of tools that could assistance in monitoring the forum: "Some people write a lot, and so I particularly could non keep up, I merely kept an eye on the forum, because many people were posting. So of a sudden, depending on the purpose, some people write a lot, and sometimes they are not as objective as they should exist" [I2].

The structure of accompaniment difficulties is shown in Fig. 4. The figure presents the difficulties and needs that were identified in the instructors' reports, highlighting the resource that instructors lack to assist them in monitoring the activities carried out in the forum. Such resources could reduce instructors' work and amend the forum, as well as streamline instructors' evaluation and facilitate feedback for students.

Fig. 4

Accompaniment difficulties

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The instructors written report that these difficulties in post-obit up the forum result in overload and exhausting work, as mentioned by I8: "It'southward a lot of work to practise on the platform. I have to answer all the comments, elaborate, and evaluate the activities, promote the discussions, and intervene in the discussions [...] doing everything on my own, there is no mechanism to help" [I8].

RQ3. What strategies do the instructors use to mediate the discussion forums?

We identified eight strategies that tin help mitigate difficulties that occur in the forum and that are related to the behavior/action of the instructors:

• (S1) Logging in daily in the forum: According to the interviewees, students notice when the teacher accesses the environment. In addition, instructors demand to identify the points that can generate more advice and debate, so it is important to monitor the forum. According to I3: "the instructor should await every day what is happening in the forum and comment on the students' participation. Otherwise the forum may run out of word or get out of context."

• (S2) Follow the situation of the students: the teacher must be attentive to participation or lack of participation of the students. "It is important to come across the situation of the students, whether they are following the forum and the activities. The teacher and tutor should monitor the students because if students take difficulty and they exercise not receive aid; this discourages and can lead to dropouts" [I5].

• (S3) Be objective: instructors must be objective and clearly state what they desire to evaluate. According to I2 "the objective of the form and the forum has to be very explicit. From the beginning, it has to be articulate to the students then that they tin can apply the tool correctly" [I2].

• (S4) Bank check how students are accessing the course: the information in the logs can help instructors proceeds information about which students have accessed the courses, what information they accessed, what participants they interacted with, and which students did not interact with the other students or did not participate in the forum.

• (S5) Categorize messages: This activity can provide valuable data to the instructor most the students, such as the near discussed subjects and the kind of participation of each student.

• (S6) Provide feedback: According to the interviewees, the students need feedback, and often instructors must foster interaction so that the students get out their comfort zone and begin to participate. "We always try to provide in the forum the mediation feedback" [I1].

• (S7) Promote interaction: For the forum to exist effective, it is important that students interact; thus, the teacher should encourage this commutation between students. Co-ordinate to I1: "we put the students to read the comments of the other students, to create a connectedness between them" [I1].

• (S8) Creating a welcoming surroundings: it is fundamental to create an environment in which students become willing to participate, collaborate, and contribute with their reflections. For I5, creating an environment in which the educatee feels comfy is crucial to the give-and-take: "The instructor has to follow the discussion by always checking the content that the students mail, withal, leaving the students at ease and then as not to harm the discussion" [I5].

Table 8 shows the difficulties that are related to the strategies listed above. Moreover, according to experienced instructors, when designing a distance learning bailiwick, it is crucial that the instructor plan and structure the virtual room earlier beginning the course, as well as keep in mind that it is essential to include the forum in all the units of the course to encourage student interaction with each other and discussion of the content taught.

Table 8 Strategies vs. difficulties

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RQ4. What improvements can exist implemented in the forums according to the instructors?

Based on the reports of the instructors, we identified 5 categories of improvements that can be implemented in the forums:

1. I.

   Gamification (Gam) — according to instructors, gamification features and participation awards can encourage students to participate more in forums and activities. Motivating students inside the educational surround is relevant for education and learning, as described past I5: "I try to use gamification, I think the imagination is everything, and yous show students that they can learn by playing inside the environment." [I5].

2. 2.

   Multimedia Resources (MR) — some instructors pointed out that it would exist interesting to add files to the comments in the forum to complement the argue. For example, I2 suggests the integration of the forum with a specific social media to attract students to the forum. Integrating the forum with social media tools can exist an effective measure as students are increasingly participating in social media and moving abroad from the forum.

3. 3.

   Interface (In) — this category is related to improving the forum interface to brand it more attractive. According to I4 "Information technology is necessary to change the interface to requite the student more want to answer." [I4].

4. Iv.

   Collaborative Resources (CR) — the instructors lack access to features of social media as pedagogical tools and they suggest, for example, including a feature that allows users to "like" a particular comment.

5. V.

   Evaluation Resources (ER) — the instructors suggest including features that aid them in evaluating the quality of the students' comments in the forum.

The identified improvements are presented in Table 9.

Table 9 Forum improvements

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Related work

Our piece of work complements the literature with qualitative information about the benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements for educational forums, which are currently scattered throughout the literature. In the following, nosotros draw the related work and how it compares to our findings.

The benefits of online word forums

Several of the benefits we found in our written report were also reported in the literature. According to Funaro and Montel [29], Nandi et al. [30] and Balaji [31], forums allow students and instructors to share their interests and asynchronously collaborate (B1). Discussions atomic number 82 to the construction of new knowledge every bit individuals share learning and negotiate information through conversations [32]. In addition, Brower [33] reports that online asynchronous tools support quality discussions and collaborative learning, reaffirming the do good of the depth of the give-and-take and collaboration (B2). According to Garrison et al. [34], in the forum, the time between postings led to more cogitating responses than those of face-to-face situations (B4). Other important benefits include flexibility, convenience, and accessibility for students to consummate their learning anytime and anyplace [31].

Moreover, Balaji and Chakrabarti [31] report that online discussion forums avert loss of information, every bit the students' written letters are stored in the virtual space and can exist retrieved and reviewed anytime, reaffirming the importance of information records for instructors (B3). They likewise study that the utilise of online discussion forums allows students to interact more than with other course participants and instructors [31].

The online discussion forums provide significant opportunities for students to actively engage in their learning process through participation [four]. The student-instructor interaction is an essential office of the bookish process [35]. Forums expand students' possibilities for exchanging ideas, with the aim of discussing topics related to the grade activities [9]. According to Afify [36], the exploitation of Asynchronous Online Discussions forums offers students the possibility to teach and learn someday and anywhere. Forums also provide students with the time needed to process learning, share ideas and points of view on east-course topics.

The literature too reports other benefits that were not mentioned by our interviews, such as the development of skills for working in virtual teams [37, 38] and the effects on offline (civic) engagement. According to [39], at that place is evidence that online appointment can translate into offline collective action.

Difficulties in online discussion forums

The literature also reports difficulties regarding accompaniment and construction. The forum's structure does not facilitate analyses such as monitoring students' agile appointment [2]. According to Nakahara et al. [forty], monitoring and classifying letters and private participation are time-consuming tasks (c.f. D1, D2, and D3). The authors report the need to constantly oversee the surroundings to make calculations on the give-and-take data and decide whether the give-and-take is developing well. According to Machado et al. [41], due to the large volume of posts that are generated on a daily basis in these environments, manual analysis becomes impractical.

Mazzolini and Madison [18] showed that instructors' participation rates – including the timing of publication and the nature of their posts – affect student participation and perception. Rohfeld and Hiemstra [42] depict the teacher as the person responsible for keeping discussions on track, contributing knowledge and insights, providing discussion topics and course components, and maintaining group harmony. Additionally, all aspects of classroom discussion – initiation, facilitation, completion, and feedback – require different approaches in an asynchronous environment [43].

In relation to lack of incentive, Liu et al. [12] emphasize that many forums have a "poor" or low-quality interface design. Coetzee et al. [44] investigated how forum design affects student activeness and learning outcomes. The findings of Thomas [4] suggest that the typical nonlinear branching construction of online discussion may exist insufficient for the realization of truly conversational modes of learning.

According to Wise et al. [45], instructors and learners need to be able to find the messages that are relevant to their purposes. However, due to the considerable number of participants in MOOCs, discussion forums are often plagued by information overload and chaos [46, 47]. On peak of this, a substantial proportion of MOOC posts are not directly related to the course [47]. As a event, forums become overwhelming and confusing for users to navigate [48].

From the perspective of structural and motivation difficulties, the work from Poquet and Dawson [49] report that the high number of students and the asynchronous nature of large-scale online courses go far hard to develop a sense of belonging and didactic conviction in educational forums. The authors provide useful indicators to explore social action in an open online course. The results of the report show that moderation in the forum is bereft for the effective evolution of participation.

Finally, the work of Liu et al. [12] examines how participants in a MOOC collaborate in the grade discussion forum and use social media tools to support the learning experience. The tendency to utilise social media is as well supported by the NMC Horizon Report [l]. Their results pointed out that poor forum interface design affects students' participation and perception of utility. Some participants considered peer learning in forums useless due to poor quality or low feedback response. Other works that nowadays difficulties in the forums are Ulrich and Nedelcu [13], Poquet and Dawson [49], Mora et al. [51], Lima et al. [52] and Bratitsis and Dimitracopoulou [53].

In our study, we identified difficulties for using educational forums that were not reported in the analyzed literature, such as the lack of statistics in the forum, lack of specific reports, lack of visualization tools, difficulty in sending files, difficulty in putting students' grades, delay in the update of comments in the forum, and lack of multimedia resources (D4, D5, D9, D10, D11, D12 and D17). Table ten summarizes the findings in the literature and presents which difficulties were identified in this report and were not reported in the analyzed literature. In addition, the table likewise presents which papers advise solutions to the various categories of difficulties.

Tabular array 10 Mapping Difficulties in the interview and literature

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Strategies and improvements in online discussion forums

The literature besides reports scattered strategies and improvements for educational forums. For example, Coetzee et al. [44] included a reputation organisation to help promote learning past giving students points for creating useful posts. According to the authors, reputation systems tin event in faster response times and a higher number of responses per post, improving students' feel in the forum.

The work of Vigentini and Clayphan [54] presents strategies to motivate participants to contribute to forums, such as posing open questions. Wise et al. [45] address the overload problem in MOOC discussion forums past developing a template for automatically classifying topics. According to the authors, there are limited means to bargain with overload and ataxia in MOOC word forums. A commonly employed strategy is to define sub-forums for dissimilar purposes. Gaspar et al. [55] also propose instruments to aid instructors to classify questions posted past students on forums in order to obtain quantitative measures and to sympathize the types of participation.

Gerosa et al. [56] presented the use of categorization and structuring of messages in asynchronous textual communication tools. Co-ordinate to the authors, the message categorization supplied subsidies for the automated nomenclature and grouping of the messages through reports that the instructors used to empathize how the discussion was progressing. Thus, the bulletin categorization helped the reduction of the information overload for the participants, since it supplied complementary information that helped the identification of the content and structure of the word without read the letters.

Already the work to Filippo et al. [9] investigated the utilise of coordination support tools for forum mediators based on notifications presented via mobile devices in guild to reduce the need for accessing the surround and monitoring the messages. The participants were informed about the forum without the demand to connect to the learning surroundings's web interface.

Finally, the work of Alencar and Netto [57] employed intelligent agents to monitor students' activities in the discussion forums then that the students are always accompanied, and the instructor has a reduced workload. Lima et al. [58] present sociograms and tables that place and narrate interactions amidst students within a Learning Management System. This strategy helped the instructors to place the interactions of their students.

Although we have plant several papers that present strategies or improvements for online discussion forums, we could not detect prove in the literature for some of the improvements suggested by our interviewees: M1, M3, M4, M5, M6, M9, M10, M12, and M18.

Relation between the research findings and existing solutions

We identified some publications that behave out investigations aiming to strengthen forums or promote social interaction among the participants. These publications present different results such as systems, frameworks, and plugins for the forums.

For Machado et al. [41], the assay of students' interactions in the forum tool tin identify learning difficulties. Nonetheless, due to the large number of messages that are created, a manual analysis of students' posts can become a very time-consuming task. Their work presents a computational model that seeks to evaluate the thematic relevance of the posts made by students. The authors developed a pedagogical support tool to allow early identification of students with learning difficulties, as well equally students who have made relevant contributions on the topic of the word. The difficulties presented by Machado [41] chronicle to difficulties D1 and D3 and the solution relates to the improvements M6 and M18 presented past our piece of work.

Hu et al. [59] propose a framework named Concept Map of Forum (CMF) to analyze online discussion forums in Moodle. The framework analyzes interaction and contents based on students' interaction with peers and posts. In traditional classroom, instructors tin observe the students' learning process and accommodate didactics strategies. However, it is difficult for instructors to understand how students learn in online forums. The difficulties presented by Hu [59] relate to difficulties D1, D2, and D3, and the solution was not identified in our work.

Moreno-Marcos [60] suggest a novel methodology, named 3S (Social, Sentiments, Skills), for analyzing forum interactions in MOOCs and a visual analytics tool for the analysis of forum activeness according to the proposed methodology. The 3S methodology supports instructors in agreement learners' behaviors such as the increase of activity near critical dates. Instructors can also do good by increasing their sensation of difficulties to acquire certain skills, which may pb to redesign of some parts of the course. According to the authors, the 3S methodology should exist adapted to each grade, regardless of the platform. The difficulties presented past work [60] relate to difficulty D2 and the proposed solution was non identified our piece of work.

Other works also propose improvements to the forum in the form of framework, tools, or plugins: such as [49, 58, 61]. The works focus on similar difficulties D2, D6, D7, D13, D17 and propose improvements that relate to M3, M4, M6, M11, and M13.

In addition, regarding the possibility of instructors to be able to evaluate the quality of the students' comments in the forum, we tin complementary that these characteristics already exist in forums of social platforms, where the users comments are rated by the community according to their quality and adherence to the questions proposed, such as Quora and Stack Overflow forums.

Implications

In this department, we hash out the implications of this study for research and do from the signal of view of dissimilar stakeholders.

LMS Forums vendors - our work has identified several issues related to the design of distance learning forums. Although the LMS Moodle is predominant among our interviews, the results may be applied to other LMS that has a like pattern. We also nowadays strategies that instructors use and that are not necessarily supported by specific forums, as tin be observed in Section 4.

Instructors/Teachers – our work provides instructors with a listing of 8 strategies they can adopt in their classes, such every bit frequent follow-up, student feedback, and more than (Section 3.3). The strategies identified are intended to assist instructors with actions they tin can take within the course and so that the forum moves smoothly, and students participate in discussions. In addition, the strategies presented in this newspaper may assist newcomer instructors who have no Distance Learning Course experience and often do not receive training to handle this. Co-ordinate to I11: "It is not easy to be a distance learning teacher, nearly teachers come from face-to-face teaching and exercise not know how to nowadays a advice that is like shooting fish in a barrel for the student to understand, this and other skills are of import for a teacher who teaches in the classroom altitude".

Coordinators of educational platforms – our work has identified and presented 19 difficulties related to online word forums. These difficulties tin can be explored by and assistance platform coordinators develop means to leverage distance learning environments. In improver, we provide a set of strategies that can assistance distance learning instructors, monitors, and coordinators. Therefore, the coordinators of educational platforms can make utilise of our findings to develop and deliver materials to support instructors. They can also make use of our findings to better understand the difficulties faced by instructors of online discussion forums. The instructors reported that many students plough to social media platforms to discuss grade subjects. Therefore, it is important to offer new possibilities of interaction and support to instructors and students; otherwise, the forum will exist less used, and instructors will go on to face difficulties understanding the participation of their students in the forum. The evidence presented hither serves as a starting point for the adoption of measures aimed at improving forums and making them a more usual tool.

Informatics in Education/Distance Learning Community – we noticed that many instructors exercise not receive adequate preparation and exercise not have acceptable online support. According to the interviews, the difficulties hinder the feedback and understanding of the word. In this mode, the altitude learning community could prepare tutorials, acceptable support, and training for people working in distance learning. Afterward all, a well-adult discussion forum in an e-learning grade can create an active, interactive, and participatory learning surroundings [62]. Also, Moodle distance learning communities tin use our findings to promote improvements in the Moodle LMS, that are used by the instructors who participated in our interviews. Table 9 presents several suggested improvements. Our piece of work has cataloged 19 difficulties and xix improvements that can be implemented in the forums or investigated in more detail.

Researchers - our piece of work has identified several benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements for educational forums. As can be seen in Table vii, at that place are many open gaps in relation to the difficulties faced past instructors, which tin be explored in hereafter research. Nevertheless, we present improvements related to the difficulties. This data tin be explored and used to empower forums, given that this instruction tool needs to be adapted to meet the needs of the new generation. More enquiry is also needed to investigate how to overcome the difficulties, to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies in different contexts, and to implement the suggested improvements to the forums. It would be as well of great interest to analyze and empathize the motivating and demotivating factors that influence students.

Limitations

The results obtained in this report are exploratory. To obtain a full comprehension of the miracle as a whole, more collection and analysis cycles and participants from dissimilar fields and regions are necessary. All the same, our results list recurrent benefits, difficulties, strategies, and suggestions from the point of view of experienced instructors, which tin be useful for novice instructors, LMS vendors, form designers, and researchers.

Additionally, we acknowledge that we likely did not place all possible benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements. We are aware that the universe of online discussion forums is enormous, which means that the findings may differ according to the platform used and cultural context. Our strategy of because different teacher profiles and institutions aimed to convalesce this problem. However, as all interviewees adopt Moodle, the results may be but generalizable to contexts like to the one mentioned above.

Another limitation is the subjectivity of data classification. We applied Grounded Theory procedures to mitigate this issue. All analysis was grounded on the collected information and we advisedly followed systematic means to acquit the analysis.

Our study was conducted with instructors from public institutions and most of them teach information science/computer science courses. Nosotros also considered participants from other disciplines who had several years of experience with altitude learning platforms (at to the lowest degree 5 years). Later on performing the analysis of the first ten interviews, we deport two boosted interviews with instructors from courses not related to calculator scientific discipline. These new interviews did non reveal much new information.

Finally, another limitation of this study is the generalization of our results to all altitude teaching instructors. Our study intends to let belittling generalization, enabling the results to extend to contexts/cases with common characteristics and for which the results are relevant.

Determination and future work

In this piece of work, we place and catalog: benefits that forums nowadays within the context of distance learning; difficulties instructors confront in using educational forums; strategies that instructors can adopt to mitigate these difficulties; and improvements that can exist implemented to generate forums that run into the needs of both instructors and students. Nosotros collected data from the point of view of instructors who teach distance education classes.

The empirical report revealed three categories of difficulties related to the forum: difficulties in following the contend, difficulties with the structure of the forum, and difficulties in motivating students. The report also immune the identification of viii strategies that are related to the behavior/action of the instructors and five categories of improvements that tin be implemented in the forums.

The results presented in this paper are relevant for understanding of the instructors' perspective, serving as support for researchers, developers, instructors, and communities of distance learning. In add-on, our results can offer insights for enquiry to promote and facilitate the use of forums.

As a future work, we plan to comport a more comprehensive investigation and test some of the improvements to empathise the extent to which our results apply and also to find new factors that affect the interaction and apply of educational discussion forums. For this, we intend to conduct a survey that will provide more data and help in understanding the phenomenon as a whole, collecting the opinion of a higher number of participants. We also intend to behave more data assay collection cycles through new rounds of interviews with instructors from other regions and disciplines.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the electric current written report are available from the respective author on reasonable asking. The Graphical representation elaborate and used in the analyze this paper are bachelor at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aqmGgeUa8GL_K637mDGcP3xGJFdbOzEGvKTlmepjP_I/edit?usp=sharing

Notes

Abbreviations

AG:

Gamification

CMF:

Concept map of forum

CR:

Collaborative resources

DFS:

Difficulty with forum construction

DI:

Instructor difficulties

ER:

Evaluation resource

GT:

Grounded-Theory

In:

Interface

LMS:

Learning Direction System

MOOC:

Massive Open Online Course

MR:

Multimedia resources

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Acknowledgements

We would like to give thanks the people who agreed to participate in the interviews and take the time to answer our questions and share their experiences in the online educational forums. Nosotros thank CAPES for the financial support granted to the work, the FAPEAM, and the 2 involved universities: UFAM and NAU.

Funding

This inquiry partially funded by DS/CAPES 2015 and FAPEAM through edital 009/2017. Tayana Conte thanks the financial support granted by CNPq through process number 311494/2017–0.

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Affiliations

1. Federal University of Amazonas – UFAM, Manaus, Brazil

   Dhanielly P. R. de Lima, Tayana U. Conte & José Francisco de M. Netto

2. Northern Arizona Academy – NAU, Flagstaff, U.s.

   Marco A. Gerosa

Contributions

DPRL is PhD student at IComp-UFAM, conducted the overall data collection and analysis and worked on nigh of the manuscript. MAG is the co-advisor for DPRL and helped direct the work, participated in the analysis, writing of the manuscript and in its successive revisions. TUC participated in the data collection and analysis and in the manuscript review. JFMN is the advisor for DPRL and participated in the data collection and enquiry pattern. All authors read and canonical the concluding manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dhanielly P. R. de Lima.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Boosted file 1.

Graphical representation with the associations related to the benefits.

Additional file 2.

Graphical representation with the associations related to the difficulties.

Additional file 3.

Graphical representation with the associations related to the improvements.

Additional file 4.

Mapping between benefits, difficulties, strategies, and improvements.

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de Lima, D.P.R., Gerosa, Grand.A., Conte, T.U. et al. What to expect, and how to meliorate online give-and-take forums: the instructors' perspective. J Internet Serv Appl 10, 22 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-019-0120-0

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• Received: 04 July 2019

• Accepted: 17 October 2019

• Published: 04 December 2019

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-019-0120-0

Keywords

• Empirical study
• Online discussion forum
• LMS
• Difficulties
• Barriers
• Hurdles
• Benefits
• Strategies
• Instructors
• Mediators

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