Students’ Interactivity in Online Discussion Forums: The Case of Language and Communication Master II students at MMUTO

Abstract

The study is mainly concerned with Students’ Interactivity in Online discussion Forums. It attempted to determine the extent to which the students are interactive in online forums and to seek out the factors influencing students’ participation. The experiment was conducted in the MMUTO under Moore’s Transactional Distance Theory by also using a mixed method research. Thus, a semi-structured interview was conducted with two instructors of the forum and a questionnaire was distributed to forty five students. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used for statistical data analysis while Mayring’s Qualitative Content Analysis helped to interpret the results of the interview. On the basis of the results of the study, it is concluded that the interaction of the students in the forum is a learner-content interaction and rather passive. The implementation of the socio-constructivist approach to teaching/learning in this forum remains a challenge. Despite their awareness of the importance of interaction, the students fulfil a passive role. The results also reveal that the main demotivating factors to participation are “Difficulty to access”, “Time constraint” and the “Lack of interaction” from the other participants. To improve the level of students’ interaction and to yield better implementation of the forum, recommendations are provided by the end of the research.