A Preliminary Analysis of Post Types of Online Course Discussion

We present a preliminary analysis of post types of asynchronous discussions in an online graduate course of Information and Library Science (ILS). Content analysis rendered a taxonomy with seven types, namely (1) reflecting on readings or lectures, (2) relating to personal experiences, (3) stimulating further discussions, (4) relating to real-life situations, (5) pointing to additional resources, (6) seeking answers, clarifications, or help, and (7) critiquing readings or lectures. The usefulness of the taxonomy is corroborated by a high inter-annotator agreement. The number of posts responding to the initial post of a thread, which can be regarded as an indicator of the popularity of the thread, is correlated to the initial post’s type. The usefulness of the dataset produced from this line of research is discussed and future work is outlined.