| The forum is an important asynchronous interaction tool in the cloud learning environment. It can promote the understanding and construction of knowledge, and the formation of critical thinking of learners by providing the functions of asking questions or replying and commenting on others' opinions in the situation of online discussion and interaction. However,a large number of studies have shown that the usage of online courses forum is not satisfactory, and some common problems still exist. Some forums are full of active members,while some are desolate. And more,even in a same forum,some discussion threads are very active and longevously, while the others are ephemeral.Hereby,the questions are arisen,how to attract the students as more as possible to engage in the discussion? Based on the aforementioned problems, this paper focuses on the researches of how to promote learners to actively participate in the interaction, how to improve the quality of interaction, and how to improve the interactive effect. The data used in this paper is from the cloud learning environment called StarC developed by Central China Normal University. This data is recorded during seven semesters in the online class. It consists of the record of 23589 learners and 12464 online classrooms, and more than one million forum interactive data. This paper is committed to promote the interactive behavior of learners in discussion forum in the cloud learning environment. It mainly includes three research contents, namely the general characteristics of interactive behavior, the evaluation of the quality of interaction and its influence factors, and the relationship between the interactive behavior rules and achievement.First, it analyzes the general characteristics of the interactive behavior in the forum from perspectives of courses, students and topic. Experimental analysis shows that learners' posting behavior varies in different kinds of courses, on different grade, sex and major of learners and about different topics. Compared with the performance in science courses, students are more active in responding topics in liberal arts. Literati girls in Sophomore year usually produce more posts than other learners. And the topics related to course content are more likely to attract learner' responses than others.Second,based on these general characteristics of interactive behavior, it proposes a quantitative model for evaluating the quality of the interaction in online discussion forums, and analyzes concretely the relevant factors that affect the quality of learners'interactive behavior. Research shows it can effectively improve the quality of interaction when teachers actively organize the discussions, but teachers' summative statement can limit learner 's effective interaction in the discussion forum. Moreover, the topic title with special symbols can effectively attract the attention of learners and promote their engage in high-quality interactive behaviors.Third,it explores the relationship between learner'various interaction behaviors and their academic performance. Research shows that significant differences exist in the academic performance of learners with different interaction behaviors. There is a negative correlation between the length of posts and the academic performance, but no significant difference between learners' different response time and academic performance. Hence teachers can encourage learners to post more and publish the short and refined posts, and the reply deadline should also be carefully setup.In a word,this paper studies learners' interactive behaviors in the discussion forum in the cloud learning environment and conducts the studies from three aspects, namely understanding the characteristics of interactive behaviors, evaluating the quality of interaction and exploring the interaction effect. The results obtained can provide good reference value for teachers and educational managers, as well as promoting learners'learning experience and improving their final learning result. |
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