Reinforcing teacher’s role in retaining students’ interests discussing online in their learning process at Malaysian tertiary institutions

Many studies from the literature related to asynchronous online discussions among tertiary students provide various advantages such as allowing students’ flexibility to provide feedbacks [38], enabling their knowledge construction [30], developing their critical thinking [39], and interacting with the lecturers regardless of time and space [1]. Thus, the use of online discussion has further become predominant to support tertiary education. Likewise in Malaysian context, research related to online discussion has demonstrated increased confidence in students’ learning. Although the findings showed positive response, there are studies [20], [3], [29], [24] proved otherwise mainly because of the teachers’ weaknesses in keeping students’ interests and motivation to use online discussions in their learning process. Based on Ames’ [4] teaching strategies and Keller’s [21] ARCS model, a systematic guidance was developed for teachers to properly help students discussing online in completing their assignments. With reference to this systematic guidance, a qualitative case study on how to retain the students’ motivation using online discussion was conducted. The respondents were final year students working in small groups. Each respondent was made compulsory to answer a checklist based on the items from Khan [22] that was used to gauge their background skills in using online forum before conducting the study. The research instruments used were online discussions and interviews. The transcripts from the online discussions were analysed using a coding scheme developed from the systematic guidance (developed from Ames’ [21] teaching strategies and Keller’s [21] ARCS model while the data from the interviews with the group leaders were used to support the findings derived from the transcript analysis. The findings revealed that the teaching strategies used in this study were able to retain the students’ interest and motivation to continue discussing online in completing their project assignments