Paper presented to the Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference, Sydney, December, 2000

This paper describes the implementation and analysis of pedagogical issues in an asynchronous discussion board within a pre-service teacher education subject. The discussion board is based on the DISCUS® software (DiscusWare, 1999) installed on a locally maintained University faculty server. The purpose of the paper is to examine students' understanding of content issues, the nature of on-line interactions and the development of learning communities. In particular, the paper focuses on an analysis of the on-line discussions that took place during the autumn semester of the year 2000.

Analysis of the board's discourse suggests that combinations of unstructured and structured discussions among cooperative groups of students and lecturers generated deep consideration of subject content, a spontaneous and energetic communication and the development of a self regulating learning community.

Over the last five years a web based discussion board has been used as part of the delivery of a final year subject in an initial teacher education degree in the Faculty of Education and Languages (henceforth, FEAL) at the University of Western Sydney Macarthur (henceforth, UWS). The subject brings together and integrates previous subjects in the degree and challenges the students to consider the relationship between their developing educational theories and their imminent pedagogy as beginning teachers. There are complementary modes in the subject. As well as the discussion board there are lectures, class tutorials, school context visits, in-school sessions and conferences. Students have access on and off campus to a subject web site that has lecture summaries, support for assignments and subject information. The DISCUS site is linked to the subject web site. Support for web related teaching initiatives at UWS was through internal projects (FlexLearn Initiative, Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching, 1998) and internal grants (Primary FlexLearn Project, [Nanlohy, 1998]). These funds established the DISCUS discussion site and provided lecturer relief for the development of the on-line learning strategies.

For the purposes of this paper three related theoretical aspects were explored. The first utilised literature relating to the design and development of on-line learning. The second took up issues surrounding software and users in on-line discussions. The third drew on theoretical models and frameworks in order to analyse discussion board transcripts. Each theoretical aspect is now discussed.

Computer mediated conferencing (CMC) is the term used to describe discussions between individuals and groups using on-line computer technologies. Generally speaking, CMC may operate through e-mail or listserv technologies (Gunawardena, Lowe and Anderson, 1999; McAteer, Tolmie, Duffy, & Corbett, 1997; Wu and Lee, 1999) or web based conferencing (Bonk, Malikowski, Angeli & East, 1998). In the subject discussed in this paper, web based conferencing was chosen over e-mail based CMC because it provided ubiquitous access and greater ease of use. The preference then for DISCUS as a web based medium was that, apart from its freeware status and ease of installation (Hedberg, Harper and Agostinho, 1998), it also had the advantage of a linear display of sub-topic pages enabling the possibility of lecturer to student group dialogue. As well, quick feedback to students' contributions was possible because tutors were able to edit student groups' postings and so maintain a dialogue in this textual medium. Another DISCUS advantage was in overcoming the difficulty of sharing threaded discussion postings between students in different groups. Each area of discussion could be seen on a single page. The whole discussion attached to each sub-topic could be printed or saved to disk in one operation. The application of the Discus software to CMC based tutorials has, in this context, provided a new model for the effective functioning of this mode of higher education delivery. As stated by Hedberg & Agostinho (1998:3), "the challenge is not necessarily one of adding to the knowledge presentation, rather it is the unlearning of traditional ways and re-conceptualising other ways of achieving similar outcomes with less demand on staff and less demand on redundant systems."

The DISCUS on-line community consists of "administrators", "moderators" and "users" within a discussion group. The administrator manages the whole discussion board. This person creates topics and groups, registers moderators and users, structures the discussion space and assigns rights and responsibilities to all those who engage in the discussion forums. Moderators and users are the main participants in the discussions. In the subject described in this paper and most online tutorial situations, moderators are the lecturers and students are the users. As they are initiating and defining the tutorial around subject content and objectives, the moderators make decisions about the structure of sub-topic pages. These decisions shape the freedoms the users of the topics enjoy which in turn bounds the autonomy of communication the users are able to exercise. (McAteer et al., 1997). Such decisions have ramification for the ways users take up the discussion board. If users feel too restricted by the limitations that have been placed on the discussion board they are less likely to use it fully. If no guidelines are placed on the board it is possible that the use of the discussion space will be purposeless. (Hedberg, J. Harper, B. & Agostinho, S., 1998:10) An anonymous discussion board has the potential to encourage negative or irresponsible use of the discussion space. Knowledge of who constitutes the audience for discussion board postings will affect the writing of the authors of those messages (Levin, 1999:142). Striking a balance between the opportunity for free use of the software and the responsibility for its appropriate application was to be central to the story of this introduction of a discussion board into this teacher education subject.

A number of models and frameworks for classifying the output of discussion boards, each supporting a theoretical perspective, are discussed in the literature. Wilson and Whitelock (1997) propose a model that analyses a range of student interactions in a CMC environment and ascribes each to knowledge, motivational or social dimensions. This model is based on a set of assumptions relating the actions and behaviours of users to the three learning dimensions. Another framework, developed by Henri proposes four dimensions of analysis: social, interactive, metacognitive and cognitive (McLoughlin and Luca, 1999:121-122). Although McLoughlin and Luca suggest that the "limitation of Henri's method of analysis is that it was designed for contexts where there was a strong teacher presence, and is not readily applicable to a learner-centered conferencing environments" (1999:222), it is debatable whether the aim of online tutorials is to lessen the role and influence of the lecturer. Indeed, the board discussed in this paper clearly shows the importance of the lecturer in the community discourse. Thus the discussion of Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson is useful in its putting forward of a social constructivist approach that is an elaboration of Henri's work. Their model describes five phases moving from knowledge sharing to knowledge building (1997:414). Bringing together these models and ideas, the analysis for this paper was able to establish frameworks around communal and cognitive uses of the discussion board. From here interrogation of the data generated categories concepts or abstractions. These sensitising concepts (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983) were checked to ensure they were dense, viable and valid.

This exploratory study sought to identify the purposes for which a particular group of undergraduate students used an online discussion space. Questions asked included: Were their uses purely social? Were they related to completing the learning tasks of the subject? Did both these elements come into play? With the students' permission the discussion space software was also employed to capture their contributions as text files and as prints of the discussion site pages. In addition to the text entered by the students and lecturers the files include automatic time and date stamping and an indication of the source of each message. Both discussion spaces were arranged so that contributions could be made by a named group of students or could be posted anonymously.

The paper transcripts were examined and each post was free coded to generate categories. These were then refined through discussion and divided into components that signified their use was to do with building of community (that is, social) or cognitive (that is exploring issues relevant to their course and subjects). As suggested in the literature, (McLoughlin and Luca) a visual map was also made of the posts to determine the relationships between them and the flow of the discussion over time.

The community of students and lecturers who used this chat space did so as part of participation in a consciously crafted learning environment. While the students began this subject as a compulsory part of their course, the lecturers sought to create the conditions in which students could take over ownership of their learning. The belief was exemplified by the organization of the online tutorial space but also by the lack of structure in the free chat space. The lecturers set a tone of enthusiastic engagement in the subject issues together with an expectation of academic rigour. They had created a context that emphasised the quality of the interactions between themselves and the students.

The students encountered the lecturers in more ways than was usual in university education. The weekly one hour lecture was held with a relatively small cohort of students (n=46). Much interpersonal interaction was possible because of the way in which the two hour tutorials modeled the pedagogy being considered in the subject content. In addition, the lecturers went with the students on four excursions to exemplary schools and mentored them during the following practicum visits. Both lecturers made themselves available for consultation outside of subject hours and provided the students with email and phone contact details.

Interaction was also supported electronically in a number of ways. The subject web site was maintained and expanded on a weekly basis. It was designed to be responsive to student needs and to their input. The online tutorial took the place of one hour of lecturer led tutorial. It was presented to the students as an opportunity to lead their own learning. Beyond securing a tutorial timeslot in a computer lab with internet access, providing the discussion board and posting the probes and responses, the responsibility for the running of the tutorial was placed into the hands of the students. The provision of feedback to student posts to the online tutorial topics helped to give momentum to the dialogue between students and lecturers. The chat space was not formally designated as a task within the subject but was simply facilitated at the entry menu of the online tutorial web site. Its extensive use by the students out weighed the online tutorial contributions by a factor of two to one in terms of words written and four to one in number of posts.

A total of 263 postings amounting to over 33,400 words were reported for 12 student users groups and two moderators over the four month sample period in the first academic semester of the year 2000. The students and the two lecturers, working as their moderators, posted 213 messages totaling 19.000 words to the free chat space and 50 messages to the online tutorial section of the site. Log analysis suggests that only a subsection of the cohort of students actively contributed to the free chat space. However comments made by students suggested that many more read the discussion. Consider, for example, this quote: "Even though I have never posted a message to this discussion board, it doesn't mean that I have not been reading them."

An analysis of the overall number of postings was made with the purpose of determining the balance of contributions across the groups. In the online tutorial discussion space all messages but one were ascribed to a group name. This was in line with the compulsory nature of this task. While the average length of student contributions increased across the four tutorial topics, contributions varied across student groups and across topics. When the student offerings were averaged, four levels of response could be seen. One group stood out as writing thoughtfully at between two and six times the contribution of any other group. The two middle groups responded at length and in some detail to the issues raised. A final set of three groups responded minimally. All responses were on task and addressed the associated probe questions.

A similar pattern could be found in the free chat space. Of those students who identified their postings one group out of 12 dominated with 30% of the posts. Another three groups made significant impact through out the discussion contributing around 4% of the text each. A further four group names were used to add an occasional comment with between 2 and 4 messages posted. Finally three of the group names were not used at all. The ranking of the posts of named groups in both the online tutorial and the free chat discussion spaces were similar: seven of the nine groups where a comparison was possible fell within one or two ranking levels of each other. It should be remembered that any student in the subject cohort could have contributed to the free chat space anonymously.

The moderators maintained a deliberate policy of minimising their contribution to this part of the free chat site (7 out of 213 messages). They responded only to specific requests for information or clarification. They never bought into serious discussions about the content, delivery or assessment of the subject (see below). In the case of the privacy debate they assured the students that they would not identify anonymous contributors.

A little less that half the messages (49%) and a little more than half words (55%) were posted anonymously. The moderator set up the discussion page so that while a username and password were required a message could only be posted anonymously if the author made a conscious choice to do so. This was done to try to preserve the balance between freedom of expression and responsibility for comment. This issue was taken up be the students who used the chat board and debated at some length:

It is possible that students from all groups may have contributed to the anonymous postings. While it was later found that there was a method available in the Discuss software to ascribe such postings to registered users the students were given assurances during the debate on anonymity that such checks would not be made.

The lecturers initiated each topic within the online tutorial site. They raised issues on which there were sure to be a range of opinions. This opening statement was known as a "probe" and each one had its own sub-topic on the discussion board. In named groups the students were asked to respond to the probes by posting a comment in that sub-section of the board. Students formed cooperative discussion groups that operated inside and outside the online component of the subject. Groups chose names associated with drinks and this served to give some personality to users. Moderators used the editing features of the software to provide written feedback to each group of students. Lecturer responses to student postings to the online tutorial were non-judgmental and supportive. The probe-response-comment pattern was repeated for each of the subject sub-topics thus allowing the discussion to be displayed on one scrolling page.

The work of students and the lecturers' comments were available and were read by students as they composed their responses to the probes. Student groups who contributed later on the nominated day referred to earlier messages suggesting that they have read these before completing their own responses to the probes. This is closer to a public discussion than the private submission and response that is usual in traditional approaches to university assessment.

Analysis of the order of contribution of the groups showed that there was no rigid hierarchy of contributors. Some patterns did emerge. Five of the groups tended to be early responders, another set of five groups tended to the middle, one group started late but finished early and one group who was the last on the first two probes did not finish the last two. These patterns of contribution suggest that the groups and the individuals who completing the online tutorial tended to find a work rhythm that suited their circumstances. This is a possible area for further study: how do the life responsibilities of students affect their opportunities for participation in on-line learning?

While maintaining the academic rigour that was essential for considering the educational issues of the subject, the lecturers encouraged an informality that helped to set a tone of open debate within the cohort of students. In the following quote a lecturer is suggesting publicly that it is OK to disagree with an authority figure from the literature.

The first sentence of this response encouraged the students to be critical of ideas that are central to the issues discussed in this subject. The second sentence and the rest of the lecturer's response indicated the standard of scholarship required within the critical debate and urged the students to consider more deeply the ideas raised by this author. In most but not all groups, a growing sophistication can be read in the responses to the four sub-topics discussed over the period of the study.

The probes provided a significant cognitive challenge for the students. The student groups were expected to post a collective response to the issues raised. To respond the students needed to engage in a number of preparatory tasks. They had to read the quote and other associated literature. Their posted responses indicated that they did draw on other reading and also on responses posted by other student groups. They needed to arrive at a consensus in order to summarize their individual views into a group response. The social negotiation of the learning tasks became an important part of the students' learning. Again this is an area for further investigation: what strategies do groups of students use to prepare a compulsory online assessment task?

The navigation structure of the software required that the chat space be encountered whilst on the way to complete the compulsory tutorial tasks. However date stamping of messages in the chat space and the online tutorial subtopics indicate that, with one or two initial exceptions, students did not post to both spaces at similar times. While this finding is counter intuitive it supports the notion that the students saw the purpose of the two on-line discussion spaces as being very different. The online tutorial posts were both compulsory and timed to be completed on a particular day. The free chat space could be accessed at will and from any internet connection that suited the convenience of the student. What is apparent from the transcripts is that from time to time the chat space was used to facilitate a continuation of the discussion in the online tutorial with reference being made to postings or issues raised there.

The purposes for which the free discussion space was used varied over time and with the changing needs of the students. The analysis developed a range of categories of use that can be divided into community building or cognitive purposes. This is shown in Table 1. The community categories tended to group around greetings and farewells, humour and philosophy, requests to lecturers and their responses and a continuing debate about anonymous posting The cognitive categories divide more simply between discussion of issues arising from experiences within the subject and debating specific aspects of the subject content. While there was overlap between these purposes, sometimes within a single post, it is true to say that the free discussion space was used for more than social reasons by a significant proportion of the group of students who had access.

Discussion of issues tended to be initiated by a single post which then generated a number of responses. Sometimes authors specifically asked for the other students to respond but more often the responses were spontaneous. Occasionally an initiating post would not stimulate any additional comment or replies. There also tended to be several conversations flowing at any one time, such is the nature of asynchronous on-line discussion spaces. When responding to other students' posts messages were often prefaced with an identifying label. When responding to a particular post a salutation such as "To Anon April 5 11.05" or "In response to anonymous (5/4 11.22 am)" would be used. When contributing to one of the debates a post might begin with a heading such as "Re: Chat on Aboriginal people." In this way this online community evolved its own usage conventions.

A significant number of the initial posts served the purpose of introducing the authors to the readers of the free chat space. The greeting messages were often addressed to the lecturer in response to a welcoming post. It should be remembered that these students knew each other outside the on-line environment. They had contact within face to face tutorial groups, were in the final year of a three year program and may have socialised outside university. They were introducing themselves into a specialized social setting. Some examples of this use of the space are:

The farewells served a social purpose of closure of the site after an often difficult shared experience. The students were taking leave of this particular social space even knowing they would continue to meet as a cohort after a mid year break.

Part of the social dimension of the student's use of the free chat site was their occasional posting of whimsical messages. A number of poems and snippets of song lyrics were posted as were a chain letter with the Dalai Lama's 19 sayings for the new millennium and a set of epigrams purportedly written by a student from Columbine High. Humour was also a way of commenting on the serious issues faced by the community such as coping with the subject workload.

Students used the site to make requests of the lecturers and of each other. The first instance of this was a request for one of the lecturers to repair the part of the subject web site that displayed the overhead transparencies from the first lecture. Students also spontaneously posted messages about useful information they had found or answers to questions about subject content or assignments. The lecturers refrained from providing answers to these questions unless specifically requested to do so be the students.

This debate ran throughout the sample period. The initial discussion centered around the value of the anonymity that the structure of the free chat board allowed. The consensus reached after some time was that anonymous posts should be used by those who wished to and an that such students could be addressed as Anonymous with a date stamp. It followed the pattern of most debates and was initially resolved after an exchange of messages.

However this particular issue was given an increased impetus when, towards the end of the semester, a vigorous argument started because one anonymous student accused another unnamed student of unfair sharing of workload. The debate that followed was largely a chastisement of the student who posted the original message together with smoothing suggestions about how the conflict should be resolved. The debate ended when the student accepted the offered advice and apologised to the group. This can be seen as a clear example of community building through which the group not only set a standard of online behaviour for itself but sanctioned one of its members when they did not meet this benchmark.

The free chat space was used to debate a number of issues of a cognitive nature. Some debates were generated by incidences within other subject activities such as school practicum visits. Some issues originated from the subject content as presented in lectures, tutorials or readings. One debate was introduced by a student after reading a letter to the editor of a local paper. The debates tended to be initiated by a post expressing a point of view which then stimulated a number of replies from the active contributors to the site. Debates usually lasted only for a relatively short time and petered out as all who were interested had posted their opinions or as a new issue captured the group's attention. Some topics debated during the sample period include;

• social justice issues of student assessment which were continued from the online tutorial topics
• a debate about "gifted and talented" students and research collection methods that were prompted by subject lectures
• teacher pessimism and conservative approaches to disadvantage which arose from experiences in schools and the community

These and other debates provided the students with an opportunity for a deeper consideration of subject issues than would have been probable in traditional tutorials. While this claim can not be objectively proven by this investigation the quality of the posts related to debating these issues is well beyond the level of social exchange.

An illustration of the value of the free chat space to students' learning was the way they used it to continue discussions begun in other subject activities. Issues raised in lectures, face to face tutorials, online tutorials, school visits and in consultation times with the lecturers were brought up in the free chat space. This forum was most often used to canvass support for views believed to be a variance with the position put in the subject readings. The free chat space became a forum where the students' concerns could be voiced and the differences of opinion discussed. An example would be one anonymous student's detailed and referenced post that addressed the idea

This post initiated one of the early debates and resulted in a series of responses from other students, some in support and some disagreeing. The post and the responses were marked by their well argued and well referenced nature. The lecturers read but refrained from responding to these discussion in a deliberate attempt to encourage the students to manage and come to own the discussion space. This was in contrast to the structured responses the lecturers provided in the online tutorial space.

It was usual to see comments on school visits soon after these had occurred. What was significant about these posts was that they went beyond recount and focused on issues raised by the students posting the messages. Usually these were a synthesis of what they had seen combined with their personal opinions as informed by their experiences in the course and the subject.

While it is not feasible to extrapolate the findings of the investigation beyond the present context, the analysis of this use of a discussion board raises a number of issues worthy of comment. The first point to make is that the two discussion sites, though very different in organization and purpose, worked together to raise the students' level of engagement in subject content issues. The online tutorial overtly created a compulsory dialogue around these topics. The free chat space provided opportunities for student led discussions that were complementary to the contributions made in the online tutorial. That the average length of the postings was over 93 words (range 2- 740) indicated that the free chat space was not used for the short, swift, social exchange that characterizes synchronous chat sites. The analysis of this space has shown it was used for a range of community building and cognitive purposes around an agenda set by the students.

Another issue concerns the leadership and facilitation of the learning community by the responsible subject lecturers. In essence, there was a sense that the lecturers were working to release students from traditional control structures of time, space, content, discourse, assessment and teacher direction. This was even true in the teacher led online tutorial. The style of their response was public, shared, engaging and not judgmental. In the free chat space their restraint enabled students to own this communication niche and to put it to their own uses. The diversity of purposes for which this space was used illustrated some of the values that students derived from the resource. In assuming ownership of the space the students had to take responsibility for the conduct of the discourse. Their willingness to do this was shown in the way community values were set towards the end of the anonymity debate. The resolution of this issue illustrated the interplay of social and cognitive aspects of the students' use of the discussion board. In the discussion around the accusation of one student by another they called on the social justice principles of the subject to make their points. The "Discus style" of discussion board also facilitated this interplay of responsibility and authority as all messages and responses for a discussion were readily available on a single page.

Future investigations of this type of online learning environments may well speculate about the role played by the students' social interactions in developing the intellectual quality of their university experience. An important question then might be, in what ways can such CMC environments support "productive pedagogies" (Ailwood et al., 2000) and encourage students to be autonomous learners? In this present study we have seen the sensitive use of communication technologies to support a spontaneous and energetic communication about content issues and the development of a self-regulating learning community.