Using the World Wide Web to promote educational discussion on university level courses

In this paper we describe our efforts in promoting educational discussion and collaborative work on university level courses. This research has been carried out in a research project entitled “Conferencing on the Web for Group Learning” (CoWoGLe project). The goal of the project is to augment the participation in and quality of educational discussion by using Web-based computer conferencing. We also aim at producing systems easily tailorable for use in various course settings, to suit different learning and teaching approaches. In this paper we report on our first efforts in this direction, by outlining the theoretical background of our work and the two prototype systems designed and implemented in the project. We provide empirical data describing the use of our systems on four courses with more than 200 students. We also indicate how our systems have evolved during the field experiments and end with a few suggestions for further work.