MODELLING OF ONLINE INTERACTIONS IN DISTANCE INSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEMS
BASED ON STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Dr. Nurettin Şimşek
Ankara University

Abstract

The situation whether the students are participating online learning activities or not, their participation frequencies and content of participation give important clues about the real function of these activities and expectations of distant learners regarding these activities. In this research, analyzing the messages between teachers and students and among students in chat sessions, it is aimed to describe the communicational structure of these sessions in which the messages are shared. ESA (Exchange Structure Analysis), which was used to analyze the messages, is a method based on categorizing the messages of participants considering the pragmatic goal of participation and giving meaning to them by digitizing. In this research, 27156 messages belonging to 280 students studying in a distance education programme were analyzed. The research findings released that more than half of students paid attention to learning activities and executed more sessions than planned. Although the frequencies of the students’ participation in the chat activities do not differ in gender; it has been found that it is affected by age, the type of residential and state of internet access facility. The average of participation frequencies is higher in centrum, county and village respectively. No significant difference between the frequencies of sending message of males and females is observed. The students send messages about content of subjects, examinations, student affairs services respectively. Different from the teachers’ messages, the students’ messages are passive, active and dominant ones respectively. The students participate in the communication process mostly by answering questions, asking questions and initiating discussion. As for teachers, they mostly participate in this process with messages regarding answering questions, response complement and initiating discussion.

Keywords

Chat analysis, online interactions, structural analysis,distance education.