Abstract:

Forums are an essential element of many online courses as, if set up well, they encourage participants to engage in higher levels of learning [1]. However, evaluating forum content and maintaining forum efficacy are two of the biggest challenges that arise for course coordinators. With a small cohort of 10 to 20 students, most forums can be followed, read and assessed by a single teacher. Yet, when the number of participants increases, hence discussion volume too, even a brisk reading of all forum posts becomes prohibitively time-consuming. Facilitators of online forums therefore need a method to gauge the efficacy of the discussions they have initiated. As designers, administrators, and teachers of a multinational online exchange called the IVEProject, the authors have faced these problems since posts generated in its forums number in the thousands. In the absence of easily available tools, our proposed solution has been to devise a set of five metrics (timeliness, depth, volume, multimedia and participants) which can serve as quantitative proxies for more time-consuming qualitative measures of forum efficacy. In this paper we present these metrics as a ‘proof of concept’ and demonstrate their use by applying them to two different forum designs. It is our proposal that these metrics could be incorporated into a comprehensive ‘forum analysis tool’ as part of any learning management system, and would be a valuable and efficient way of giving course designers and teachers a method of assessing the health of forums in addition to being alerted to potential issues within discussions.

Keywords:

forum metrics, intercultural communication, IVEProject, virtual exchange.