Encouraging Forum Participation in Online Courses with Collectivist, Individualist and Neutral Motivational Framings

This special issue of the eLearning Papers is based on the contributions made to the EMOOCS 2014 conference jointly organized by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and P.A.U. Education. Download Print Version.
Encouraging Forum Participation in Online Courses with Collectivist, Individualist and Neutral Motivational Framings
By René F. Kizilcec, Daniel McFarland. Online discussion forums have been shown to contribute to the trust and cohesion of groups, and their use has been associated with greater overall engagement in online courses.
We devised two experimental interventions to encourage learners to participate in forums. A collectivist (“your participation benefits everyone”), individualist (“you benefit from participating”), or neutral (“there is a forum”) framing was employed to tailor encouragements for forum participation. An email encouragement was sent out to all enrolled users at the start of the course (study 1: general encouragement), and later in the course, to just those who had not participated in the forum (study 2: targeted encouragement). More...