Students' perceptions of compulsory asynchronous online discussion

Online discussion boards are increasingly being used by tertiary educators as tools for encouraging student interaction and for developing learning networks. In particular, educators who have adopted a socio constructivist approach to teaching are keen to facilitate collaborative learning in which students share their experiences and perspectives, and construct knowledge together through shared meanings. In this paper, the findings from an electronic survey of 72 distance education students' perceptions of an online discussion assessment item (ODAI) are presented. The study revealed that the majority of the respondents enjoyed the ODAI, and agreed that the online discussions had allowed them to achieve a range of cognitive and social learning outcomes, and to develop some important graduate skills