Graduate Students’ Antecedents to Meaningful and Constructive Discussions: Developing Potential Collaborative Online Interactions

The study analyzes evidence of how online graduate students perceive antecedents to productive online discussion posts and exchanges. It seeks to document how graduate students perceive good and bad discussions (both face-to-face and online). Through descriptive qualitative analysis we consider how graduate students describe online productive social interactions. Graduate student data provide potential elements and “rules” for discussion posts and group work that promote higher-order cognitive skills. As one graduate student succinctly offered, “I enjoyed reading my classmates’ lists, especially because it was so informative to learn what characteristics my classmates find most important in regards to discussions. This information will help me in how I approach our group work and discussion throughout this class. I was happy for the opportunity to use everyone’s wonderful posts in order to expand, elaborate, and clarify my own thoughts.”