Supporting Mathematics Teachers' Online Discussion with the Use of Animated Classroom Stories as Reference Point

Sustaining online discussion in general has been a critical problem because of the nature of text-based exchange among participants. Supporting online teacher learning through the use of forums, in particular, has been more difficult because of the extreme complexity of the instructional practice that participants are expected to learn. We have used animated classroom episodes as embedded reference points in forum and a design-based research approach to develop and evaluate virtual settings for mathematics teachers to improve their practical skills. This paper reports on a part of results of the second study of the approach. We show evidence that teacher users produced meaningful and in-depth discussion over a period of eight weeks. This evidence supports the principle of embedding animations directly to the discussion space, which we found in a previous study, as well as supports a new principle of organizing forum in a tree-based structure format.