Factors Affecting Contributions to Electronic Discussion Boards: A Preliminary Analysis

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of contributions to the electronic discussion board for a postgraduate computing course. The data covers four different classes over a two year period, and will be extended to six classes by the time of the ICCE2002 conference. After attemp ting unsuccessfully to relate the levels of student contributions to other data about the students (such as age, education, gender, language) or to the level of lecturer contributions, the author has concluded that the most important factor may be the students' preferences with regard to learning activities and resources. Other investigations of the qualitative nature of the contributions have not helped significantly to explain the inter-class differences.