Discursive Evaluation in a Distributed Learning Community

This paper reports on a distance education project where a threaded discussion board was used for interaction amongst students and teachers. The experiences from the first year of the project shows that such a forum can be an important complement to other evaluative resources in order to monitor student's expectations and experiences. Furthermore, it is argued that discursive evaluations can serve the purpose of establishing a learning community with shared norms and forms of communication and collaboration. Vital properties of the discussion board are that it is continuos, online, public, asynchronous and auto-structuring. 1. EVALUATION IN DISTANCE EDUCATION Evaluation is an important tool in higher education, guiding faculty and management towards better courses with improved methods of teaching and administration. The literature describes many formal techniques and instruments for this purpose [e.g Oliver 1997]. Since most methods for evaluation require substantial resources for measuring as well as analysis, the dominating instrument is probably a simple written postcourse questionnaire with multiple choice questions and/or open-ended short comments [Hall 1997]. In addition to the results from formal evaluation, teachers have a rich flow of more informal and sometimes sublime feedback arriving continuously from a variety of sources. Casual conversation with students and colleagues, the atmosphere in classroom and corridors and student's body language and degree of attention during a lecture can all be viewed as carriers of evaluative feedback, [Svensson & Sorensen, 2000]. Informal feedback, such as this, is of course not only interpreted by faculty members. For students it can be a vital element in processes of, for example, socialisation and of the class-community maintenance. In a distance educational setting, with students and teachers separated in time and space, these signals are drastically reduced. To compensate for this type of informal communication with computer-mediated interaction is difficult, if even possible. Whittaker et al [1994] addresses the general issue of designing IT to support informal workplace communication, arriving at the conclusion that a shared workspace is an important aspect and that rich synchronous video-media and asynchronous text based media should be combined and integrated when aiming for an acceptable design. The focus of this paper is a threaded discussion board where students and teachers meet to discuss courserelated issues. This is an informal arena of conversation where students can express their attitudes, opinions, perceptions and experiences. Such a forum can serve as a valuable complement to traditional post course Discursive Evaluation in a Distributed Learning Community 1111 questionnaires, even making it possible for teachers to challenge and manage these student-opinions. The arguments are based on experiences from a distance education project at a university in Scandinavia. The empirical data of the study are the entries made by students and teachers to a web-based computer conference (discussion-board). This conference is integrated into a web-education system developed at the University. The entries have been analysed with respect to evaluative factors such as topic and nature.