Effectiveness of online forum as a platform to exchange thoughts among university students

Abstract

Higher education institutions such as UTM have developed elearning related website that has online forums to enhance teaching and learning. However, research has argued that online forums provided in the elearning@utm official website was not well utilized in classroom. Research on online forum has been neglected in the language classroom. Thus, this study investigated the effectiveness of using online forum to help tertiary level students exchange thoughts. The research has two stages firstly, whether the online forum help students to exchange their thoughts, and secondly, whether the shared thoughts can fulfill the task given in the online forum. The study was carried out using qualitative methods which included analyzing texts from the online forum postings by 27 students, and online reflections from 24 students who participated in the online forum using prescribed online questions. Analysis of students’ postings showed that majority of the students failed to fulfill the given task due to referring and copying of each other’s postings. However, analysis of the reflections showed that online forum indeed did help students to share their thoughts because it was convenient to use and provided more opportunities for them to share thoughts. Based on the findings, although the students stated that online forum can positively help them to exchange thoughts, they have failed to fulfill the given tasks which indicated that online forum used for this study was not effective. In the future, it is recommended that online forum can be used to encourage exchange of thoughts but, it requires involvement from lecturers to monitor students’ discussion to ensure the effectiveness of using this platform for learning.