Do we need a discussion forum?

Abstract

This paper is a response to an issue that arose during a 2013 ascilite Community Mentoring Project (CMP) in which the (social scientist) mentor and the (physical scientist) mentee discovered that they had very different assumptions about the ways in which people learn online. This paper begins a process of unpacking the complex relationships between discussion forum behaviour and the ways in which lecturers and students think about higher education and their disciplines. A multiple case study approach is described in which discussion forum data is compared with themes emerging from survey and interview data in two different disciplines in two universities. It is suggested that the roots of these differences may lie not so much in the nature of the disciplines themselves but more in the ways in which people think in these disciplines. These findings will be of use in course and curriculum design.