Du Zhao, Wang Fang, Wang Shan, Xiao Xiao
Business School of Sport, Beijing Sport University, Beijing, China.
Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2022 Apr 15;13:819640. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.819640. eCollection 2022.
Online discussion forums are an essential and standard setup in online courses to facilitate interactions among learners. However, learners' inadequate participation in online discussion forums is a long-standing challenge, which necessitates instructor intervention and the design consideration of online learning platforms. This research proposes and studies the role of mandatory participation, i.e., learners' participation in online course forums by instructors' requirements, in fostering their voluntary participation and boosting their learning performance. This novel effect link between mandatory participation and voluntary participation has not been assessed in previous research. An empirical study is conducted using a large-scale dataset of 27,767 learners from a leading massive open online course (MOOC) platform in China. The findings indicate that besides its direct effect on learning performance, learners' mandatory participation has a significant positive effect on their voluntary participation in online course forums, enhancing learning performance. Moreover, the effect of mandatory participation on voluntary participation varies across learner groups, being more prominent for early registrants than late registrants and part-time learners than full-time learners. This research contributes to the online learning literature by introducing mandatory participation as a viable approach to foster voluntary participation and boost learning performance through enhanced voluntary participation. It provides evidence on the effectiveness of the novel design feature of MOOC platforms that enables and facilitates the mandatory participation mechanism in online learning.
在线讨论论坛是在线课程中促进学习者之间互动的重要且标准的设置。然而，学习者在在线讨论论坛中的参与不足是一个长期存在的挑战，这需要教师的干预以及在线学习平台的设计考量。本研究提出并探讨了强制参与的作用，即学习者根据教师的要求参与在线课程论坛，在促进他们的自愿参与和提高学习成绩方面的作用。之前的研究尚未评估强制参与和自愿参与之间这种新颖的效应联系。本研究使用来自中国一个领先的大规模开放在线课程（MOOC）平台的27767名学习者的大规模数据集进行了实证研究。研究结果表明，除了对学习成绩有直接影响外，学习者的强制参与对他们在在线课程论坛中的自愿参与有显著的积极影响，从而提高学习成绩。此外，强制参与对自愿参与的影响因学习者群体而异，对于早期注册者比晚期注册者更显著，对于兼职学习者比全职学习者更显著。本研究通过引入强制参与作为一种可行的方法，通过增强自愿参与来促进自愿参与和提高学习成绩，为在线学习文献做出了贡献。它为MOOC平台的新颖设计特征的有效性提供了证据，该特征在在线学习中启用并促进了强制参与机制。
