Keep it Positive!

Abstract

As online course offering proliferate, helping online instructors create a positive learning context is increasingly important in encouraging online engagement. This study found that in asynchronous online discussions of in-service teachers in graduate courses in Education, positive emotional language by an instructor, in both private entries and public messages, results in similarly positive messaging in notes by students. An analysis of the discussion entries from 20 graduate level online courses, with a total of 573 students and 43,640 separate entries, used large grain sentiment analysis, and found significant correlations between the tone of teacher messages and the tone of student responses. This study illustrates the social constructivist-based understanding that both teachers and learners play a part in iteratively developing a positive, and potentially more collaborative, online environment, that can be more conducive for both teaching and learning. Instructors have the opportunity to more proactively nurture positive engagement in the online learning community through positively orienting their online discussion communications.