FORUMS USED AS TOOLS FOR DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ SELF-REGULATED LEARNING SKILLS IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
FORUMS USED AS TOOLS FOR DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ SELF-REGULATED LEARNING SKILLS IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Summary/Abstract: Modern e-Learning Systems have reached an impressive level of complexity, and while the number of features has ever increased, the methods of interaction with students have remained mostly unchanged (chat, forum, internal messaging, e-mail). A rather habitual tool within e-Learning systems is the forum, through which members can have conversations that can be read in a logical order later on. Within a classic e-Learning system, a student can post questions or answer somebody else’s, but the posted messages themselves can be more or less to the point. Thus it is necessary for the teacher to follow the conversations and step in where applicable, but at the same time it would be ideal if the teacher could rate and review the posts, to point out how relevant or valuable they are, while providing feedback at the same time. The forum of an e-Learning system should provide additional features besides those commonly met in such a tool; it should be a forum that is adapted to e-Learning, with features for giving feedback to students, emphasizing valuable posts, and rewarding students. The current article offers a mechanism that can help fulfil the features mentioned above, by extending the classic forum of an e-Learning system with in-place elements that can be easily used by teachers and students altogether. It only takes a couple of clicks to give feedback, but it has a very high educational value within the e-Learning process. The mechanism is part of an e-Learning system model MEM (Metacognitive E-Learning system Model), which was introduced in a previous paper, and it can be extrapolated to all types of forums.

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