Asynchronous Discussion Forum - Assignment Example

Bodendorf (2009).is of the opinion that communication amongst students is very crucial for any effective learning. However, he notes in the online learning systems currently in use, this concept has not been given the seriousness it deserves. Some authors say that online course lacks cognitive presence and therefore, it is not possible for some students to attain high learning levels. It has been suggested that online courses will be able to bridge the existing gap between face-to-face learning experiences and online environments (Darabi et al 2011).

 However, Ellis & Hafner (2008) observe that ADF is faced with several obstacles.This research will be focused on answering this question: How much change has been observed in the number of Asynchronous Discussion Forum publications on particular websites in the last decade? Is there a decrease or increase in the number of publications on this topic appearing on these websites?A thorough literature review was done to find out which studies can attain the selection criteria outlined below.

The criteria are either exclusion or inclusion. i)Appearing between 2003 and 2013 in journals published in English ii) Studies based on the Asynchronous discussion forum in education iii) Some of the major phrases employed in search strategies are asynchronous discussion,  asynchronous communication,  collaborative/asynchronous and asynchronous computer-supported collaborative learning. A thorough document examination was made in popular electronic databases among them: Wiley InterScience, ScienceDirect, and EBSCOhost.

The snowball technique was then employed by examining the references to the articles relevant to the topic under study. To add to the descriptive summaries created from quantitative data the interpretation of the chosen texts was done through the implementation of qualitative content analysis. This method was intentionally employed in the integration of statistical formalism with the qualitatively done analysis.