The Impact of Different Instructor Participation Approaches in Asynchronous Online Discussions on Student Performance

Instructor participation plays a crucial role in asynchronous online discussions, with the approach taken potentially impacting student performance. This study compared two instructor participation approaches: replying to student posts on public discussion boards and commenting on student posts on private grade pages. It examined the impact on both the quantity of student participation and the quality of student posts. The findings revealed that students had more interactions with each other when the instructor replied on discussion boards than when the instructor commented on grade pages, despite both approaches leading to an interconnected social network. The number of student posts and the overall quality of student posts did not show a significant difference between the two approaches. Nonetheless, both approaches contributed to a gradual improvement in the quality of student posts over time. Additionally, when the instructor commented on grade pages, students gradually focused more on knowledge construction in their posts rather than social communication.