Using Relevance To Facilitate Online Participation in a Hybrid Course.

Number 4 2003 • EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY 67 University enrollments are swelling with a new generation of students who expect campusbased courses to be supported by Webbased resources and communication tools. Instructors have begun meeting the demand by using Web-based tools such as online discussion boards to support face-to-face instruction. However, attempts to use these online communication tools are often accompanied by struggles to boost and maintain enthusiasm and participation among students. In the study briefly reported on here, I worked with an instructor who was using Blackboard to support a classroombased introductory course in educational technology. I was a graduate teaching assistant and co-taught the class. Using a control group and a treatment group, we set out to study the effectiveness of a simple strategy designed to enhance the relevance of the online discussion. We examined students’ perceived relevance of the required online discussions and how those perceptions related to actual online participation and satisfaction. Relevance plays a large part in learning and motivation. Research has shown that relevant information and experiences can improve achievement and perceived motivation, predict a student’s commitment to and effort toward a particular goal, and increase the likelihood that learners will try a variety of learning strategies. According to John Keller’s Attention-Relevance-Confidence-Satisfaction (ARCS) model of motivation, instructional designers and teachers can use relevance-enhancing strategies to make instructional content and delivery more familiar or more aligned with learners’ goals. The strategy we used was to modify the title of the discussion prompts so that the title made an explicit connection to a particular course assignment. We hoped that this simple strategy would increase student participation and satisfaction with online discussions.