January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

In addition, all groups developed 82 discussion threads and 48 (58.5%) discussion threads belonged to monologues.
This result confirmed serial monologues in which students freely represented their opinions and responded to
previous messages with a minimal effort made to connect to the discussion threads rather than continuous inquiry
presented by their peers covered most interaction in asynchronous discussion (Pawan et al., 2003). In other words,
discussions in this study were one-way (replying to previous message) rather than two-way (replying to the reply).
The density of the network based on message flow was quite low as well. There are several possible reasons for
achieving sparse network. First, students did not have face-to-face contact and thus they did not have chance to build
informal relationships. Second, only two weeks was not enough time to establish trust among students. Third, the
number of group members was large and this might hinder developing virtual community.
Evaluation criteria might influence one-way interaction pattern. Students should post their own thought and more
than five responses to get a perfect score and 64 students (74.4%) got 5 points. Accordingly, most students posted
their perspectives as initiation and selectively responded to peers’ initiations without turn-taking to satisfy required
number and type of posting. Actually, 1 initiation covered 76.1% and 5-6 responses covered 57.9% to satisfy
evaluation criteria as Table 5 and Table 6 show.
Table 5. Number of Initiations by Participants
Number of Initiations Number of Participants Percentage of Participants
0 11 12.5%
1 67 76.1%
2 10 11.4%
Total 88 100.0%
Table 6. Number of Responses by Participants
Number of Responses Number of Participants Percentage of Participants
0 3 3.4%
1 6 6.8%
2 4 4.6%
3 6 6.8%
4 2 2.3%
5 28 31.8%
6 23 26.1%
7 11 12.5%
8 4 4.6%
9 0 0.0%
10 1 1.1%
Total 88 100.0%
Most students posted their message on each group forum and only two students posted their message on other group
fora. Students had an opportunity to post their thoughts regardless of group but they did not actively participate in
other group’s discussion. Students read most peers’ postings but posted a few responses to satisfy the required
number of postings as Table 7 and Table 8 show. This result supported a previous study (Hara et al., 2000) which
referred to type of posting of undergraduate students which was less responsive to their peers. Especially, a high
percentage (66.0%) of messages having no response gave the implication regarding a ‘lurker’ who only read peers’
messages and did not present his or her own thoughts, and the degree of disconnected discussion. In this context, it
was no wonder that the discussions were not adequately sustained and most interaction was one-way interaction as a
result.
Table 7: Number of References by Message
Number of References Number of Messages Percentage of Messages
2~10 273 50.9%
11~20 139 26.0%
21~30 50 9.3%
31~40 25 4.7%
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