Understanding Asynchronous Discussions in University Pedagogy Online Courses

Abstract

Especially in staff development courses were students have busy schedules, asynchronous discussions are a preferable choice due to their flexibility.There are multiple ways to organize these discussions, and understanding each solution is important in order to be able to choose the optimal solution for an online course.We evaluate our solution for collaborative online learning in a university pedagogical online course that primarily utilizes Google Docs.We present quantitative data showing student activity during the online course as well as a qualitative analysis on the contents of students discussions in order to effectively understand and evaluate our solution.We propose that Google Docs is a preferable solution to threader forum -type of solutions for organizing asynchronous online discussions.