Discursive Evalyation in a Distributed Learning Community

Abstract

This paper reports on a distance education project where a threaded discussion board was used for interaction amongst students and teachers. The experiences from the first year of the project shows that such a forum can be an important complement to other evaluative resources in order to monitor student's expectations and experiences. Furthermore, it is argued that discursive evaluations can serve the purpose of establishing a learning community with shared norms and forms of communication and collaboration. Vital properties of the discussion board are that it is continuos, online, public, asynchronous and auto-structuring.