BUILDING UNDERSTANDING IN ASYCHRONOUS DISCUSSIONS: EXAMINING TYPES OF ONLINE DISCOURSE

This article describes a study exploring how students’ learning is reflected in asynchronous online discussion. The study examined how online discourse contributes to the learning process. In examining online group discussions using discourse analysis, five different types of discourse were identified: goal setting, reflection, connection, original reformulation, and re-direction. With the different types of discourse, we explained how each message or a threaded message facilitated the discussion, particularly in terms of collaborative efforts to achieve the goal(s). The nature of each type of discourse was illustrated, including how different strategies were identified in the data and how different results of discussion were demonstrated in the data. We also describe the methodological issues related to the analysis of online discourse and discuss implications for research and practice.