A study on evaluation of online discussion forums in cloud learning environment

Online discussion forum is an important asynchronous interaction for students and teachers in Cloud Learning Environment (CLE). Based on the data obtained from a real CLE system called StarC, we examined some main factors that may affect the performance of forums. The main contribution of this paper includes two folds. Firstly, we propose a quantitative model for evaluation of the quality of online discussion forums. Secondly, study on the performance of the interactions reveals that the actions of instructors and the presentation pattern of the initial message have significant effect on the quality of the discussion in forums.