Students` Motivations and Online Discussion Group Participation

Objectives: In the literature, learners' participation to online discussion boards has been reported to be an issue of online environments when it is not compulsory. Learners' motivations could be a reason. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate the student motivations during their studies and identify if they relate to discussion board participation.

Methods: The sample of this study consisted of students from the 1st, 3rd and postgraduate dental students, at the School of Clinical Dentistry of the University of Sheffield. The method used for this research was a short paper questionnaire consisted of 5 complex questions. The students were informed that participation was voluntary and anonymous.

Results: An overall response rate of 90 percent of the distributed questionnaires was obtained. On the question what is your main motivation during your studies almost 50 percent of the respondents answered that there main need was to pass the course. Almost half of the respondents did not find a need to participate to an online discussion board unless they were forced by the course. This percentage was around 60% at those that their main need is to pass the course and 25% at those that their main need is to learn. None of the respondents that their main need was to get a good grade actively participated at an online forum during a course

Conclusion: A relation between students' motivation and discussion board participation was identified. Only the respondents that were motivated to learn did not require an extrinsically motivated factor to participate to an online discussion board during a course. Younger and less mature students were more influenced by extrinsically motivating factors while older and more mature rely mostly on the intrinsically factors. “Grade” motivated respondents' were the ones that were most reluctant to actively participate.