Students’ Online Participation Patterns in Knowledge

Abstract

The Peer Tutoring Project was developed to provide a common framework for a cross-school network of teachers who were interested to engage in curriculum implementation of collaborative knowledge building using Knowledge Forum (KF). Students from 5 schools actively participated in this project which took place mainly over summer in Hong Kong. The teachers involved in the project did not have to engage in any substantial development of curriculum resources but they had to identify some study topics and associated key questions for exploration for their students working in small groups. The students came from a variety of grade levels, ranging from Secondary 3 (Grade 9) to Secondary 6 (Grade 12), and the subject areas also ranged from the sciences to the humanities subjects. This project was the first opportunity for teachers and students to work on KF. In most online discussion forums, passive recipients of messages (lurkers) are the majority and a small number of active participants provide a large portion of message contributions. This paper attempts to investigate the participation patterns arising from the asynchronous online discussion among 221 students. Further to the distinction between passive and active participation, four clusters were clearly identified based on eight participation elements collected from the KF system logs, such as number of nodes created, number of editing, and number of reading. This classification provides a conceptual differentiation of active or passive participation in terms of read-and-write engagement. The results also indicated the relationship between the four clusters and student academic performance.