Abstract
Online discussions have become important educational activities through which collaborative learning and knowledge construction in online courses can be facilitated. This study is an empirical case study in which a group of graduate students’ participation and knowledge construction in two online discussion settings is explored and compared. We examine participants’ interactions by dividing their online discussion posts into four types and investigate their knowledge construction by coding and analyzing the discourse. Results reveal that the participants tended to create more words and contents in the audio or video posts than those in the text posts. Besides, although most of knowledge construction behaviors took place in the early phases, the participants involved in the process of knowledge construction more frequently when the discussions occurred in the VoiceThread platform.

Keywords
Participation, knowledge construction, online discussion board, VoiceThread.

Cite this paper
Chen Guo, Xiangdong Chen, Yanru Hou, A Case Study of Students’ Participation and Knowledge Construction in Two Online Discussion Settings , SCIREA Journal of Computer. Volume 5, Issue 5, October 2020 | PP. 110-123.

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