Using Student Facilitation and Interactive Tools Within and Beyond the LMS: Towards Creating an Authentic Community of Inquiry

Introduction

The Learning Management System (LMS), interchangeably referred to as a Course Management System (CMS), is well established within online higher education as a core technology to enable online and blended learning (Legon & Garrett, 2018). The LMS has aspects designed to maintain the safety and security of students’ personal information, to manage registrar and grading functions, and to contain and deliver the course content held as the intellectual property of the university (Siemens, 2004). The LMS threaded discussion forum found in industry-standard LMSs (e.g., BlackBoard, Canvas, Moodle) is most often the primary site for dialogue in online distance education (Anderson & Dron, 2012; Gorsky & Caspi, 2005).

A central role of dialogue derives from a constructivist learning paradigm, wherein learners should be actively interacting with content and with each other to construct understanding, rather than passively “consuming” information (Sjoberg, 2007). Additionally, dialogue can serve as a way for students to take on responsibility through collaboration (Siqin & Chu, 2019). In spite of its importance in online learning, research conducted over the past three decades demonstrates some consistent challenges with asynchronous online course discussions, including posts of lower levels of quality (Ak, 2016; Ghadirian, Salehi, & Ayub, 2018; Zhou, 2015) inconsistently, and at times arbitrary patterns of participation (Hewitt, 2005; Wise & Hsiao, 2019). There are a few qualitative studies that could illuminate process interactions and experiences, but that work suggests that learners often experience online course discussions as “going through the motions” to meet course requirements rather than as meaningful exchanges (Gregg, 2016; Rourke & Kanuka, 2007).

One challenge identified in the research is the interface design of the standard LMS threaded forum itself. In a review of the discussion forum literature, Gao, Zhang, and Franklin (2013) identified four primary limitations of the standard threaded design. First, because most interfaces highlight unread messages at the top of the list, students tend to read and respond to the most recently-posted messages first. This causes the focus of the overall discussion itself to be lost as “the excessive focus on new posts can unintentionally shift participants’ attention away from discussing important issues” (Gao et al., 2013, p. 473). Hewitt’s (2005) computer simulation of posting habits run at large scale demonstrated this phenomenon: “specifically, the widespread practice of focusing attention on unread notes during computer conferencing sessions can produce a starvation condition that hastens the death of some threads and reduces the likelihood that inactive threads will become active again” (p. 567). Second, the standard hierarchical display of the forums means that visually the discussion itself does not reflect authentic interactions. Third, ideas typically are not synthesized and integrated because individuals are only responding to individual posts. Finally, “there is a lack of emotional cues and timely feedback” (Gao, Zhang, & Franklin, 2013, p. 473).