Abstract:

This presentation is concerned with communication in an online learning environment and attempts to shed light on community building strategies used by students in the asynchronous online discussion forums. The material for this study was collected from text-based asynchronous discussion forums which constituted part of the compulsory course work for a course in English proficiency at second semester university level in Sweden. The students were divided into three separate groups and all three had the same course material and were taught by the same instructor. The instructor had no discussion forum input besides the initial instructions for how the students were expected to use it. The students’ task was to ask questions and answer others’ questions. Instructor feedback was given at a later date in a seminar. All three groups had other course activities, such as real time seminars, besides the discussion forums. Two of the groups studied online exclusively and studied from diverse geographical locations, while the third group studied had their real time seminars in the same physical environment on campus. In order to determine how and to what extent students used community building devices in their communication, Lapadat’s (2007) model of discourse devices used for community building was adapted. The study revealed that disclosure, asking for and offering help, inviting comment and alignment were used by all three groups. There were however a number of discourse devices used for building community which the two online groups frequently used but that were not used by the campus group, that is, the group that met in the same physical environment for seminars. Those that studied on campus rarely used greetings, social remarks and nor did they employ closings adapted from the genre of letter writing and email. All three of these were commonly used by participants in the exclusively online groups.

Keywords:

Community building, asynchronous discussion forums.