https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2315-5975
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ABSTRACT
With the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), online education has been increasingly adopted globally. However, whether the online teaching approach is effective for students’ learning engagement and motivation is still an open question. To improve students’ learning engagement and motivation to minimize students’ indulgent in procrastination and plagiarism behavior, an experimental case study on forum-based online teaching was carried out. Results showed that compared to traditional class teaching, the forum-based online teaching effectively improved students’ learning engagement and motivation as well as reduced procrastination and plagiarism. Although some students are emotionally resistant to this new forum-based online teaching method, most of the students believed their presentation and other academic skills could be improved through forum-based online teaching. Moreover, students generally accepted moderate levels of peer pressure and competition that were created by the forum-based learning process. Therefore, forum-based online teaching can be considered as a useful complementary approach to traditional class teaching. The implications of this study include that breaking a final “term paper” into multiple small online submissions helps students proactively complete homework assignments and avoids plagiarism. Moreover, educators integrate theories into students’ life experiences through online teaching forums, which also improve student learning engagement and motivation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethical approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Informed consent
“Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study”.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Xiaowei Kang
Xiaowei Kang, PhD, an associate professor at College of Teacher Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. He received PhD in Education from Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China in 2013, and performed one year visiting research at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 2017–2018 funded by China Scholarship Council (CSC). His research focuses on teacher education, teacher research, teaching, and learning. He has published academic papers and books in the field of education research.
Wen Zhang
Wen Zhang is a faculty member of NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a second appointment in the Department of Chemical and Material Engineering. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) registered in the States of New Jersey and Delaware. He is an American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) Board Certified Environmental Engineer (BCEE). Dr Wen Zhang’s research focuses on colloidal interfaces and processes that are crucial for environmental and chemical engineering applications. His expertise includes environmental behavior and interfacial processes for nanomaterials, microplastics, and soft particles such as microbes and bubbles, reactive membrane filtration systems for desalination and emerging contaminant removal, photocatalysis for pollutant degradation and solar conversion into hydrogen, and microalgal removal and harvesting processing using magnetophoretic separation and membrane filtration processes. His current research also expands from agricultural applications of nanobubbles to lithium recovery from spent lithium-ion batteries.