Improving online class forums by seeding discussions and managing section size

Abstract

Discussion forums are an integral part of all online and many offline courses. But in many cases they are presented as an afterthought, offered to the students to use as they wish. In this paper, we explore ways to steer discussion forums to produce high-quality learning interactions. In the context of a Physics course, we investigate two ideas: seeding the forum with prior-year student content, and varying the sizes of "sections" of students who can see each other's comments.