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This study aims to examine students' perceptions of the use of asynchronous discussion forums to facilitate case‐based learning in financial accounting, measuring whether students' perceptions of the benefits of using online discussion forums are related to – and can be predicted from – students' demographic profiles. The paper commences by briefly reviewing the case study‐based learning literature, followed by an in‐depth review of the use of asynchronous discussion forums as a delivery platform. These pedagogical approaches are then linked to the emerging needs and learning styles of the current generation of “digital” students.

The study, which is questionnaire‐based, uses data collected from two New Zealand universities. A choice modelling approach is used to analyse the data in order to correlate students' preferences for online discussion forum usage with their profiles.

The findings of the study indicate that students perceive numerous benefits to be associated with case‐based online discussions, including learning from other students' opinions and perspectives, the opportunity to debate issues critically, encouragement to think independently, a heightened awareness of their communication ability and assisting them to revise prior‐held views of accounting. These findings, supported by students' comments, suggest that the use of asynchronous discussion forums has created a social discourse of learning, assisting in the construction of a community of practice in financial accounting. The choice modelling analysis of the results indicates that the students most likely to be positively disposed towards discussion groups are older, male, domestic students, who have English as a first language. Of the international student respondents, Asian students perceive the forum as being most useful.

The study provides evidence that accounting students perceive value from the use of asynchronous discussion forums. Furthermore, the choice modelling identifies which particular groups of students may benefit most from the use of online discussion forums. The findings suggest that accounting educators may gainfully employ this learning technique in their courses as a means of developing critical thinking skills, building a heightened awareness of the student's ability to communicate and enhancing overall student engagement and participation in course work.

Drawing on the ideas of conversation analysis (CA), the purpose of this paper is to elaborate the picture of dialogical information seeking and sharing. To this end, information seeking and sharing are approached as interactive online talk occurring in an asynchronous discussion forum.

The conceptual framework is based on the elaboration of Schegloff’s model for sequence organisation in spoken conversation. As a result, ten categories constitutive of asynchronous online talk were identified. It was further examined how online talk of this type is structured by expanded question – answers adjacency pairs and how such pairs are constitutive of dialogical information seeking and sharing. This question was explored by scrutinising 20 discussion threads downloaded from a do-it-yourself related online forum.

Four ideal typical patterns of asynchronous online talk were identified. Answering the question is a basic pattern of online talk, based on the provision of responses to an individual request. Specifying the answer, broadening the discussion topic and challenging the answer represent more sophisticated patterns incorporating post-expansions of diverse kind.

As the study focusses on four patterns constitutive of online talk occurring in a particular domain, the findings cannot be generalised to depict the phenomena of dialogical information interaction as a whole. Further research is needed to scrutiny the particular features of asynchronous online talk in the context of dialogical information interaction.

The paper pioneers by examining the potential of CA in the micro-level study of dialogical information seeking and sharing structured by expanded adjacency pairs. The findings also identify the limitations of the conversation analytic methodology in the study of asynchronous online discourse.

With the growth of digital education, students increasingly interact in a variety of ways. The potential effects of these interactions on their learning process are not fully understood and the outcomes may depend on the tool used. This study explores the communication patterns and learning effectiveness developed by students using two basic synchronous and asynchronous communication tools in e-learning environments, specifically business simulation games.

The authors conduct a quasi-experiment research with 478 online business students, 267 of whom used online discussion forums and 211 interacted via an instant messaging app. The application of learning analytics and text mining on natural language processing allows us to explore the student communication patterns with each of tools and their effectiveness in terms of learning.

The results confirm the complementarity of the communication tools, asynchronous tools being especially the suitable for task-related communication and synchronous ones for speeding up and facilitating student social interactions.

The main value of this research lies in the use of data analytics and text mining to access and analyse the content of student interactions to assess the learning process in greater depth, comparing synchronous and asynchronous learning modes, considering that little is known about the impact of online synchronous interaction or instant messaging, and even less about the different features, content and performance that emerge when these two learner interaction modalities are compared.

Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, as they operate as multipliers for thousands of students. However, despite several advantages of e-learning environments compared to traditional class-teaching, there are still challenges regarding suitable e-learning tools and didactical models. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of several e-learning tools on students’ knowledge and skills growth and to compare two learning paths, synchronous vs asynchronous, exploring how each affects the level of students’ knowledge achievement and skills acquisition.

The empirical analysis is based on an online course “Participatory processes in environmental politics”. International MSc and PhD students who enrolled in the course were from FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany) and Aberta University (Portugal). The course was designed as the flipped classroom, applying different e-learning tools and activities, some synchronous and others asynchronous. A pre- and post-evaluation questionnaire was applied to evaluate students’ knowledge and skills. Descriptive statistical analyses were carried out on this data.

Results showed that in the synchronous group, knowledge about theoretical approaches to citizen participation and sustainable environmental governance improved to a greater extent, whereas the asynchronous group showed greater improvement in nearly all skills related to intercultural communication and e-learning. Also, in the synchronous path, students enhanced their knowledge on “research application” to a greater extent.

Evaluating the effectiveness of different e-learning tools on students’ sustainability knowledge and information and communication technologies skills is a fundamental issue. The study discusses these issues, contributing to enhancing the use of adequate and grounded e-learning models on sustainable development in higher education.

As most teachers realize, classroom discussions have limitations including time restraints, reserved participants, or domineering discussants. With the advent of Web 2.0, the opportunities for class discussion have expanded to include synchronous and asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Discussion forums, as an extension of classroom discussions and activities, allow teachers to target multiple social studies skills while giving students opportunities to expand their own historical understandings via peer interaction. Whether the goal is to address specific historical thinking skills or push students to think about what it means to be an active citizen in a diverse society, discussion forums can play an integral role in the development of students’ understanding of society. I describe the reasons for expanding discussion into these new mediums and provide examples of students’ online discussions. Recommendations are offered for teachers who would like to begin using discussion forums in their own classrooms.

In an online executive education setting, online discussions are seen as a frequently used pedagogical tool that promotes higher level of learning and critical thinking. A teacher's role is seen more as a moderator or facilitator of learning than as a lecturer or preacher. This shift of roles enhances the online students’ opportunities to critically think and reflect; and encourages co-creation of knowledge by way of peer discussions. It is imperative that students apply their critical thinking as well as soft skills to effectively participate and contribute towards making the discussion forum as self-regulated. However, in reality it needs explicit planning and effort on the part of the teacher to motivate them towards this positional shift. This chapter presents the motivation and techniques for improving student engagement by way of assigning them the role of moderator in a predominantly asynchronous online course for management graduates. A qualitative analysis of the observations made based on the application of three techniques of student moderation on student cohorts is shared and implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study on the creation of an intelligent discussion board (IDB) that promotes active participation of all students, better threading, and re‐uses vast collections of discussions.

This paper presents an IDB that was modeled like an intelligent tutoring system with a similar set of data sources, coding schemes, and dialog patterns. The system was tested with two undergraduate courses and quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to compare discussions on the IDB and the traditional discussion board.

The results of the case study and analysis of discussion board postings showed that the IDB contained fewer unrelated postings than their traditional counterparts.

The IDB was created to overcome the challenges like students paraphrasing each other, lurking, and lack of cohesion in the postings. They can serve as an assessment tool for discussion forums. The IDB must guide the discussion without controlling the free flow of ideas. Further research with larger numbers of students and also in multiple domains is necessary.

IDBs can be created with the existing resources and technologies and can serve as an assessment tool. Promoting better communication can lead to improved learning with asynchronous discussion boards.

This paper presents the first description of an IDB that can overcome challenges to traditional discussion boards and can also serve as a valuable assessment tool.

The purpose of this study is to introduce a virtual collaborative learning setting called “Net Economy”, which we established as part of an international learning network of currently six universities, and present our approach to continuously improve the course in each cycle.

Using the community of inquiry framework as guidance and canonical action research (CAR) as the chosen research design, the discussion forum of the online course is assessed regarding its critical thinking value. We thereby measure critical thinking with the help of the according model provided by Newman et al. (1995), which differentiates 40 indicators of critical thinking from 10 different categories.

The calculated critical thinking ratios for the analyzed two discussion threads indicate a strong use of outside knowledge, intensive justification and critical assessment of posts by the students. But at the same time, there are also weak spots, like manifold repetitions. Based on these results, we derive changes for the next course cycle to improve the critical thinking of the students.

A comparison of the results after the next course cycle will then allow us to assess the effects of the implemented changes, which would not be possible without a critical thinking diagnosis approach.

To explore the use of asynchronous and synchronous text‐based communication using the internet as a means of promoting discussion among a knowledge‐building community of school students carrying out a science investigation.

Activity theory is used to bring together the various theories associated with the study, both those framing the context and those concerned with data analysis. Logfiles from both asynchronous and synchronous discussion forums were analysed to identify critical incidents – sequences of interactions between students indicating significant discussions concerned with knowledge‐building – which were then the subject of critical incident recall through group interviews with the students involved. This method of data analysis allows the subjects of the research to engage in the construction of meaning, giving access to aspects of the discussions that are otherwise not available from the transcripts of online discussions.

Although it was not expected that synchronous interactions would yield significantly rich interactions between students, logfile analysis shows this is not the case. Critical incidents from synchronous interactions can lead to a large amount of information about the social processes of knowledge‐construction.

The significance of synchronous text‐based interactions in this study suggests that an appropriate pedagogy may prove valuable for teachers employing this strategy, providing a way to reveal students' tacit understandings as they engage in knowledge construction.

There is little comparable work involving school students undertaking knowledge‐building in a synchronous, text‐based environment.

Asynchronous online discussion forums play an important role in adult online courses, and have many possible functions. Our experience in using the discussion forums in online courses for task-based collaborative discussion has led us to many questions about the optimal ways of using online discussion to support collaborative learning, such as how should instructors structure online discussions in a way that it promotes collaborative learning? What should instructors do to enhance learners' reflective thinking, critical thinking, or problem solving in online collaborative discussions? The challenges of using forum in learning have also been highlighted by many researchers. In this paper, we present a so-called “smart” discussion forum to support, monitor and facilitate task-based collaboration for the learning process of adult learners to advance their development of critical thinking.