Measuring Student Participation in a Web-based Environment: A Framework for Developing New Tools

Student participation has been found to be a key factor in the success of online distance learning. Instructor feedback is a key element of students’ continued engagement, and effective instructors need to establish mechanisms to understand, encourage and judge student participation. This usually requires devoting several hours reviewing, measuring and grading student participation. To better comprehend the methods currently used to measure student participation, an analysis was performed on 100+ documented empirical distance-learning studies. Based on this analysis, this paper reports a participation evaluation classification and develops an integrated participation evaluation framework that aims to help direct future research related to improving an instructor’s ability to efficiently understand student participation. The paper also presents an example of a webbased tool that adheres to the framework and was specifically developed to help instructors evaluate on-line discussions.