Participant activity and facilitator strategies in an LMS-based discussion forum

Abstract

New ways of communicating challenge us to rethink the ways that we define both the acts of writing and the texts that are created. How can technology be constitutive for reflective and interactive writing during field practice in higher education? This paper reports on a study in which six student teachers wrote logs in an asynchronous LMS-based discussion forum that offered a practice of online interaction between the students, their mentors and lecturers. This resulted in discussions dominated by a two-way interaction between the lecturer and the individual student, but also the achievement of prolonged forum reflections and students' acquisition of theory. This paper examines some of the challenges of the instructor role in collaborative online learning environments.