The Relationship between Using an Informal Synchronous Medium and Participation in Online Group Work: An Explorative Study

Achieving student participation has been argued as one of the most important challenges in distance education. This explorative study examines whether a synchronous communication medium, instant messaging (IM), may enable students to participate more actively in online group work. When comparing two groups that adopted IM with two groups that did not, it was found that the adopters were related with a higher sense of participation, and spent more time working with content and communicating with peers. Moreover, the social networks of the adopters were slightly denser. Thus, the study indicates that the groups that adopted IM operated with a higher level of participation even though it should be noted that these results are based on a small group of students. All groups used e-mail for group interactions but the adopters also used IM as a complement to e-mail. The paper is concluded by calling for more research that tests the results of this study in other contexts.