A discussion board has become an essential tool in many Learning Management Systems because of it’s potential to allow the construction of knowledge through active participation from the students. Unfortunately for the past few years when online discussion was implemented by the authors, it has received unsatisfactory number of quality responses from the students. Rewards were often required to encourage the students to participate. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors why some students participated actively while some students become lurkers in the learning environment. Factors from the Western and Asian countries are extracted from previous research. The authors sought to investigate the reasons that encourage or inhibit the students from participating in the online discussion through findings acquired from three case studies carried out in a private higher education in Malaysia.

1. The reasons encouraging or
inhibiting students active
participation in asynchronous
online discussion board:
3 cases from Malaysia
Siew-Woei, Ah-Choo & Cho-Chuan
Multimedia University & University of Nottingham (Malaysia Campus)

2. Advantages of online
discussion
•as a record-keeping between
the lecturers, students and peers
for the execution of major
projects in their courses
•to promote a community of
inquiry among the students
•exchange of thoughts

3. Aim
• It is hoped that active learning
would take place and many
exchange of thoughts will
happen which eventually will lead to
meaningful learning.

4. Problem with online
discussion
• Minority of the students
participated actively and little
means of exchange thoughts happen.
• Majority of students turned
themselves into lurkers (passive
participation), who do not want to
post questions or make comments on
a threaded discussion.

5. Aim
to investigate further what actually
influence the students’ decision
of being an active or passive
participator, by focusing the study
in one of the first private higher
learning institution in Malaysia.

6. EXTRACTION FROM PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON THE REASONS THAT
ENCOURAGED OR INHIBITED STUDENTS’ PARTICIPATION ON ONLINE
DISCUSSION.
Studies Encourages Studies Inhibits
[9], [10] Online participation is made mandatory. [10] Students are being forced to contribute.
[5], [11],
[12]
Rewards (especially grades) will be given to students. [7], [14] No mark is given to students.
[13], [14]
Participation is based on a need that contributes to their
assessments.
[5], [7], [14], [18] Do not see a need/reason for participation.
[5], [14],
[15]
Students have some comments on a topic posted earlier. [5], [15] Students have no comment on a topic posted earlier.
[14], [16],
[17]
Instructor’s influences (asking questions, giving feedback in
time).
[19]
Questions or comments were already posted by other
students.
[7], [10] Students have interest on the opinions made by their peers. [15] Instructors have concluded/summarized a topic.
[5], [10],
[18], [26]
Good usability or interface design of the online discussion
software.
[5], [20] Other students have not raised any interesting questions.
[18], [28],
[29]
Students feel belonging to the online discussion board
community.
[5], [15], [27]
Other students have stirred up the online environment
(pontificate, being threaten, being emotional).
[5]
Student has personal relationship with the person who started
the thread.
[5], [21], [22], [23],
[24]
Students’ posting received no or delayed response from their
peers.
[18]
Students are comfortable with the discussion board
environment.
[5], [12], [18], [20] Lack of time to response to a topic.
[7] Students have higher intrinsic motivation.
[5], [7], [18], [25],
[26]
Poor usability design or interface design of the online
discussion software.
[5], [12] Personal traits-extroverts. [7] Students find it troublesome to post.
[5], [7] Students do not know the owner of the topic.
[5], [7], [15] Students lack of knowledge on the topic.
[7]
Students lack of privacy or refuse their identity to be
revealed.
[12] Poor motivation.
[5] , [12] Personal traits-shyness.

7. 3 Categories

8. Investigation of students’ decision of being an active or passive
participator in three different situations

9. 1st
study n=79
• The course objective was to expose the students
to the deployment of Internet applications.
• reward of 5% out of the assignment total
marks
• At the end of the online discussion, a
questionnaire (checkbox) was distributed to the
students to investigate the reasons of their
participations.
• The students were asked to select the four
possible reasons that reflected their
participation.

10. First study findings
• 60% participated because mark was
rewarded and added to the course assessment.
• 53% participated because bonus mark was
rewarded for each posting made.
• 46.47% participated because “the
lecturer/tutor emphasizes on the usage of
the discussion board”
• only 39% participated because they can reflect
and do revision through online discussion.

11. 2nd
study n=56
•The course objective was to
expose student to media
appreciation.
•Half of the topics were rewarded
5% while the others without
reward.
•Refer to the paper for the table

12. 2nd
study findings
• when marks are
allocated, posting
and reading
participation
increased
• differences of the
number of their
postings were more
than 50%.
Topics Rewards
No. of
Post
Times of
read
Topic 1 5% marks 133 536
Topic 2 No mark 37 187
Topic 3 5% marks 156 444
Topic 4 No mark 22 124
Topic 5 5% marks 105 367
Topic 6 No mark 22 118
Topic 7 5% marks 121 329
Topic 8 No mark 20 106
the number of times a thread was viewed (passive participation) is
often higher than the number of a thread was being commented
(active participation).

13. 3rd
study n=35
• The course objective was to expose the students to
the design of desktop publishing.
▫ The participations were informed that no reward
is given for participation.
• The duration for discussion is two weeks.
• The survey question is “Did you participate in the
discussion board? If yes, write down what made
you to do so and if you have not participated,
write down why you did not participate.”
• The data was coded according to themes and
number of occurrences was labeled as frequency.

14. 3rd
study’s finding
• The main reason for
students’ participation
is to obtain more
information or
knowledge.
• Students want to gain
some marks, get
updated with the course
and not missed out
• A student would very
likely to participate if
they are made
compulsory to
participate.
TABLE 3. FREQUENCY OF REASONS FOR PARTICIPATION AND NOT ABLE TO PARTICIPATE.
Reasons for participation f Reasons for not able to participate f
** To get information/ knowledge 6 * Forget username and password 9
** Want to gain marks/point 2 ** Busy (with other assignments or work) 6
** Mandatory 2 * No Internet access at home 5
* Want to be updated 2 ** Prefer reading only 3
* Don’t want to miss out 2 * Forget of such task 3
** Know it will benefit him/herself 1
** Don’t understand question or no answer
for it
3
** Familiarity with environment 1 ** Answers already answered 2
** Want to share information 1 * Slow connection 2
** Might come out in exam 1 * Forget URL 2
** Want to voice out opinion 1 * Not sure what to do 2
** Don’t think it is important 1
* Don’t like to discuss because it’s
headache
1
* Others (confusion with other discussion
board available)
8
* Denotes new reasons
** Denotes reasons that were also identified in previous research

15. By understanding these factors sets the basic ground for the
discussion boards’ moderators to design their discussion board
more effectively so that active learning can occur and
meaningful learning takes place.

16. Understanding reasons,
not making assumptions
• Personally investigate the reasons when a
student (or majority) would not participate
actively.
• Lurkers-moderators could adopt guidelines
that address the issues such as students not
seeing the need for online discussion, the
behavior of other participants, personality traits,
students being at loss of what to contribute,
students showing low-level knowledge
construction and technical aspects.

17. Quality is better than
quantity
• As listed in Table 1, quality/interesting
messages encourages others students to
contribute further.
• it is more important for a student to show some
form of active learning in online discussion and
this must be measured by analyzing the quality
of the content posted rather than the number
of posting made.
• To check on quality, several forms of assessment
such as Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring
Rubric and others are available on the Internet
were adopted to evaluate the quality of messages.

18. Cautious on tangible
rewards
• Finding from the first and second case study revealed
that one of the main reasons for students to participate is
based on their personal motivation and subsequently
their behavior in online discussion.
• tangible rewards is detrimental to their own
interest of learning and build up a habit of expecting
tangible rewards (especially marks). Use non-tangible
reward.
• Although the studies revealed that students’ active
participation is mainly due to rewards and not due to
intellectual reason such as reflecting or revision on their
learning, however, when reward are not given, they
still participate based on intrinsic motivation

19. Promote critical
thinking
• As Gokhale mentioned learning
collaboratively … promotes critical
thinking
• Paraphrasing each other should be avoided
• Therefore, students should be convinced of the
advantages of active participation, i.e. the ability
of active participation in online discussion could
change their thinking behavior from ‘ordinary
thinking’ to ‘critical thinking.’

20. swling@mmu.edu.my