Simply providing online discussion forums is not enough to keep students engaged in virtual courses, according to educators who are well-versed in online instruction: For real learning to occur in an online setting, virtual-school educators must establish clear rubrics and enforce rules for participation.

Recently, educators came together in their own online forum for a webinar from the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) to discuss the topic: "What Works in Creating Student-to-Student Interaction in Online Courses?"

As more and more middle and high school students take online courses, virtual-school teachers and administrators are looking for ways to make the online learning experience as engaging and effective as possible, said Susan Lowes, director of research and evaluation for the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University Teachers College.

Much of this effort has focused on creating interactive content, such as animations and simulations, and on incorporating plenty of opportunities for meaningful interaction among students, such as group projects and discussions.

Lowes used a technique called network analysis, as well as interviews with teachers, to study how students interact in online discussion forums.

Lowes' analysis compares two discussion forums from the same online course, taught by two different facilitators.

The large red circles in the middle represent the forum moderators, and the other large circles represent participants who had the most number of people responding to them during the discussion. The arrows show the direction that comments flowed, and the width of the line shows how many times participants talked back and forth.

What is evident in this analysis is that the discussion represented by the diagram on the right was much more evenly distributed across participants, and participants interacted with many different people. In the discussion shown on the left, two students dominated most of the talk, while some students--represented as black dots far away from the diagram--did not participate at any point in the discussion.

To understand how these two discussions on the same topic developed differently, Lowes divided the interaction into three categories: (1) "cheerleading," or posting reinforcement, such as "Great job!," that added no new information; (2) adding new information; and (3) questioning or challenging.

"What we found," said Lowes, "was that the left-hand conversation had much more cheerleading, while the right-hand conversation had more new information added and questioning. This leads to the conclusion that cheerleading tends only to create more cheerleading, while questioning leads to more new information added. Basically, cheerleading doesn't move the conversation forward at all."