Student discussion forums: what is in it for them?

Online social networks have become an integral part of the lives of students. We extended our teaching delivery to include an informal discussion forum in the form of a Facebook group. Participation in this group was completely voluntary. This group was managed by students and existed independently from the usual academic offering.Concurrent with this group, we provided a formal discussion forum hosted on our departmental server. Participation was compulsory for students whose class attendance was unsatisfactory. Students were expected to comply with strict netiquette standards on this forum.We describe how we created and managed these forums. We observed student behaviour on both these forums by evaluating the content of the forums in terms of types of posts and the quality of the posts. Towards the end of the course we conducted a survey that enabled us to form an impression of why and how students prefer to participate (or not) in the discussion forums.We determined the correlation of student participation on these forums with their overall academic perfromance. We also critically discuss the formation of virtual communities amongst the students who participated in the forums and reflect on the effect that these communities had on overall student involvement in class activities. We provide arguments to support our view that many of the advantages of the use of asynchronous online discussion forums in teaching and learning may be missed owing to our inability to exploit them to the full, and our student's lack of motivation to take advantage of the opportunities at their disposal.