Engagement, role-behaviors and thought-leaders. An analysis of student behavior in asynchronous online learning environments

The rapid growth of online learning has exposed numerous fundamental gaps in our knowledge, both theoretical and pragmatic. This research investigated some fundamental questions of encouraging and maintaining student engagement, the role of emergent leaders in online leaning and the influence of different behaviors. Student behaviors in problem-based Asynchronous Online Discussion boards were analyzed for 10 graduate courses. Content Analysis was performed on discussion board transcripts. Messages were analyzed according to both Socio-Cognitive (Role-Behavior) and Cognitive frameworks (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) and student perceptions of peers as Thought-Leaders were elicited. Clear patterns of strong emergent leadership behaviors were evident in the majority of courses. The patterns of interaction and influence indicated that sonic behavior types (Facilitating) were fundamentally more important for collaborative knowledge building. The presence of strong but facilitating peer leaders was highly correlated with perceived satisfaction, levels of engagement and with objective measures of success such as deepening levels of student discourse. Thought-Leaders could be distinguished from non-Thought-Leaders from both their professional backgrounds and the role-behaviors they exhibited. Student perceptions of peers as Thought-Leaders were highly influenced by factors such as the extent to which students could bring in relevant professional experience into the discussions, a general sense of "quality: of the student posts and the extent to which they started or promoted rich discussion. The Role-behavior framework presented was found to have substantial utility as an analytical framework due to its high concordance with the Anderson and Krathwohl scheme and with objective measures of discussion quality.