The ‘forum effect’: how does participation in online forums affect student retention and academic performance at a distance learning university?

Distance learning universities use online asynchronous forums to engage students in course content and build student academic communities. This research uses a mixed-methods approach to provide new empirical and qualitative evidence on the impact of online forum participation on student retention and academic performance on an undergraduate Economics course at a distance learning university. Using inferential logit regression models, we find forum participation has a positive impact on the pass/distinction boundary but not on the pass/fail-resit boundary. Moreover, this study provides evidence of a significant positive effect of forum participation on retention. Encouraging students to post is important because there is a positive ‘forum effect’ regardless of whether the student initiates the post. We also find that the marginal benefit of forum posting is diminishing, implying that ‘nudging’ a student to post even a few times can have a positive impact on their retention, with the first post being most critical. Qualitative evidence from student interviewees suggests that the nature of the forum activities and time aspects are important factors influencing student motivation to participate. Based on these findings we create an ‘ideal recipe’ for forum activities that is most likely to elicit student participation and thus aid student retention.