| Explosive gro.wth of knowledge and rapid development of technology have posed an unprecedented challenge to the traditional learning model. Against the backdrop, online learning has drawn wide attention and applications. Free of limits of time and space,online learning can provide learners with a brand-new learning environment integrating quality online learning resources, diversified learning tools,free and extensive learning space. While meeting diverse learning demands of students, online learning is an effective approach to realizing lifelong learning.Online discussion is an important channel for online learners to exchange information and share knowledge. Through online discussion, interaction and collaboration process of online learning is realized, which can help learners with knowledge construction and involvement in advanced cognitive activities. However,numerous experimental results show that the current online discussion effect is far from satisfactory. Students show little enthusiasm to participate in online discussion.The discussion quality is poor. Therefore,what strategies can effectively improve students' engagement in online discussion has become an issue of great concern to online learning.Students' engagement in online discussion is evaluated by their engagement effect, which is usually complex and hard to quantify. Currently, Chinese scholars mainly focus on studying online learning engagement models, theories and strategies.Few of them have paid research attention to strategies to improve students'engagement in online discussion. To fill the research gap, this paper designs corresponding strategies based on existing theories and methods, attempting to improve students' engagement in online discussion. Below is the specific research work of this paper:Firstly, design of strategies to improve engagement in online discussion: By reviewing literatures engagement in online discussion and combining relevant theories and principles, strategies are proposed to improve students' engagement in online discussion from the perspective of teachers and students, respectively.Strategies are expounded from four dimensions,namely stimulating students'engagement motivation, providing the support, promoting their interaction, and strengthening supervision and feedback.Secondly, implementation of strategies based on teaching interaction activities:"Charm of Color Information",a course provided by "CCNU's Cloud platform",is taken an example. Forum and QQ are used to design teaching interaction activities based on curriculum tasks. These tasks are decomposed with every task as a topic.Students from two classes are organized for multiple online discussions. Part of intervention strategies are applied to the online discussion process of these students at an attempt to guide students to deepen their interaction.Thirdly, verification of validity of strategies: The quasi-experimental research method is adopted to verify validity of s'trategies. Discussion texts and emotional experience results of students after implementation of strategies are collected as the analysis basis of experimental results. Students' engagement in online discussion is evaluated from three dimensions, including behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagement. To be specific, students' behavioral engagement is evaluated based on a quantitative analysis of students'behaviors,including their presentation and reply; students' cognitive engagement is evaluated based on analysis of students' interaction network structure and cognition decoding results of their discussion content; and students' emotional engagement is evaluated by a questionnaire survey based on "Emotional Experience Scale".Fourthly, comparison of evaluation results of online discussion engagement after implementation of the experimental strategies and the traditional strategies: The influence of the experimental strategies on improving students' engagement is verified,and conclusions are reached.In terms of behavioral participation, behaviors of students' speeches and replies are obviously increased. Students' enthusiasm is greatly improved; but feedback on others is lower than that of speeches. A lot of students are in one-way communication.Therefore, in addition to raise the enthusiasm of students' speeches in the online discussion,we should pay more attention to promote multiway communication between students, increasing the behavior of students' feedback.Research results suggest:In terms of behavioral engagement, the number of students' behaviors, including active presentation and reply significantly increases, suggesting a significant improvement of students' enthusiasm to participate in discussion. However, students'active feedback of others' behaviors is less frequent than their active presentation.This means that most students are still in one-way discussion. Therefore, during the online discussion process, apart from improving students' enthusiasm to share their ideas,promotion of multiway communication and increase of mutual feedback calls for more attention.In terms of cognitive engagement, student activities of a higher cognition dimension are significantly improved, but there are no significant differences between student activities of a low cognition dimension and a medium cognition dimension.In terms of emotional engagement, students' engagement decreases significantly.Students' negative emotional engagement also declines obviously. The positive and negative emotional experiences coexist.Through the above strategy design and implementation process and the quantitative analysis of students' online discussion engagement, it is hoped that the strategies can not only provide references for teachers about design of teaching interaction activities, but also effectively improve students' engagement in online discussion. |
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