Examining the use of asynchronous voice discussion in a blended-learning environment

Abstract

Many scholars and educators around the world acknowledge that interactions among students as well as between students and instructors play a crucial role in a blended-learning environment. Such interactions can occur asynchronously using a text based discussion forum which allows students to participate at their own pace. However, participants in text based discussion forums may run the risk of being misunderstood due to the lack of non-verbal cues. In this paper, we examined the use of a Wimba Voice Board to support asynchronous voice discussion. A quasi-experiment research design involving two classes of undergraduate students was conducted. One of the classes (n = 24 students) used the Wimba Voice Board while the other (n = 18 students) used a text discussion forum in BlackBoard. Data were gathered from the students' online postings and responses to openended questions at the completion of the study. The results of the independent t-test analysis suggested that there was no significant difference in the students' degree of participation in the two classes, asynchronous voice discuss class (M = 2.92, SD = 1.586) and text discussion class (M = 2.78, SD = 1.353), (t = 0.299, df = 40, p = 0.767) at the 0.05 level of significance, although the mean number of posts in the former was higher than that in the latter. However, analyses of students' reflection data suggested that asynchronous voice discussion have several advantages over text forums. We discuss three of them in this paper.