peer-moderated asynchronous online discussions: a ...

The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015

PEER-MODERATED ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE DISCUSSIONS: A CASE STUDY OF PEER E-MODERATION SUPPORTS 1

Hajar Ghadirian, 1,2Ahmad Fauzi Mohd Ayub, 2Kamariah Abu Bakar & 1Abu Daud Silong 1 Department of Foundation of Education, Faculty of Educational Studies 2 Institute For Mathematical Research Universiti Putra Malaysia Abstract

Efforts to attract students’ participation in asynchronous online discussions (AOD) have taken a number of various paths; mostly on the role of instructor as moderators. Despite economical advantages proposed by peer moderation of AODs, students’ e-moderation supports have not been widely explored in Asian cultures. To better understand and address this gap, this study reports a qualitative case study exploring the peer moderators’ e-moderation supports used to attract their group mates to participate more in AODs. Data were collected from students’ discussion transcripts and log files. AODs’ density was chosen as the criterion to look for successful AODs. We deemed a peer moderator to have successfully attracted other students to participant if the AOD had a density score above the mean density score. E-moderation supports enacted by the peer moderators were then examined. Using quantitative content analysis, all e-moderation supports were identified to be adapted by peer moderators. However, knowledge construction, information exchange, and socialization supports were found to be of continuous importance. Keywords: Asynchronous online discussion, instructor moderation, peer moderation

Introduction In both fully online and blended courses, discussion forums, being asynchronous tools, are valued for the opportunities they afford for selfregulated learning or active learning, encouraging critical thinking, supporting construction of collaborative learning in the form of computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL), and promoting reflective and thoughtful content in the discussion (Wong & Bakar, 2009; Yeh, 2010). Moreover, participation in asynchronous online discussions (AOD) is highly correlated with students’ learning performance evaluated through final course grade in distance education (KunhiMohamed, 2012). Nevertheless, researchers and practitioners still observed low participation rates or lack of interaction in AODs (Dennen, 2008). In other words, students’ comments that are made frequently by students do not respond to or build on each other (Thomas, 2002). The limited responsiveness and interactivity found in many AODs suggests a lack of attention to the ideas of others and that many students interpret discussion participation as being more about ‘‘making posts’’ than engaging in dialog. Probably, engaging in dialog or interactivity require students to read post of varied others and write responses to them consecutively (Wise, Speer, Marbouti, & Hsiao, 2013). Thus, how to motivation students to

participate fully and meaningfully in AODs that in turn affect learning outcomes of learners enrolled in the courses is the area worthy of attention (Wuttikietpaiboon, 2012). One important means to foster students’ participation is through moderation which has two approaches: instructor moderation or peer moderation (Ng, Cheung, & Hew, 2009). Moderation is “any kind of support given by a human to help at reaching the goal of the ediscussion” (Gil, Schwarz, & Asterhan, 2007, p. 227). Basically, a number of facilitation strategies, mostly focusing on the instructor as moderator, have been addressed in the literature (e.g., Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003). However, in many cases instructors’ moderation incurred the risk of teacher-centered discussions and oppressed certain students (Rovai, 2002). Student moderation was perceived to be a more feasible alternative to instructor moderation (Seo, 2007). Unlike the rapid use of peer moderation strategy in Western countries and among postgraduates, such practice has not been investigated among undergraduates of Asian cultures (Gairín-Sallán, Rodríguez-Gómez, & Armengol-Asparó, 2010; Xie, Yu, & Bradshaw, 2014), a key gap this study attempts to address. Furthermore, the extant research on student moderation is limited in two ways. First, the exact

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 moderation behaviors that peer moderators were supposed to perform were typically not delineated clearly. Second, although Hew and Cheung (2008) specified seven types of peer moderators’ supports in AODs involving Asian participants, the focus of their investigation was on the depth of AODs (i.e., threads that had six or more levels of message postings). More specifically, AODs’ density, and how the practice of peer supports may shape the density of AODs were not explored (Chan, Hew & Cheung, 2009; Kienle & Ritterskamp, 2007). This qualitative case study used a blended undergraduate course to look at strategies utilized by peer moderators to promote participation and foster density in AODs. By focusing on density of AODs, this study sought to provide awareness for prospective peer moderators in Asian cultures on the application of conversational functions to sustain a denser AOD. Literature review Teacher moderation of asynchronous online discussions Teacher moderation has been considered a critical indicator of teaching presence that strongly influences students’ participation in AODs (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001). Consequently, a number of facilitation strategies focusing on the role of the instructor as a facilitator have been identified. For instance, Gairín-Sallán et al. (2010) separated teachers’ moderation roles into four main tasks including, organizational, technical, social, and intellectual functions. When serving in an organizational role, the moderator sets the agenda, objectives, and expectations for students’ participation in AODs. It has been found that explicit expectations from instructor (e.g., providing rubric for grading) increase students’ participation in AODs (Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002). The social role contains amplification of good discussion behaviors, welcoming messages, and encouraging participation through positive tone. Facilitator encouragement has been found to be a sufficient condition for increased participation among postgraduate students (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003). The intellectual role, being the most important, uses techniques to encourage a high level of students’ responses by asking questions, synthesizing key points, and nurturing the intellectual climate in AODs (Mason, 1991).

Technical role involve helping students overcome technical difficulties or concerns on how to access the AODs (Cifuentes, Murphy, Segur, & Kodali, 1997). Generally, keeping the discussion on track, establishing ground rules and good discussant behavior, giving encouragement, helping students overcome technical difficulties, using problemcentric, curiosity-arousing wordings when initiating a discussion or drawing students’ attention to opposing perspectives are activities fulfilled by instructors to promote students’ participation (Hewitt, 2005). It is critical, however, to note that shortcomings of instructor-led AODs have been identified in the literature. For instance, managing a large AOD is overwhelming and instructors may not be able to perform all the moderation duties due to the high time commitment demanded (Rourke & Anderson, 2002). Mazzolini and Maddison (2003) found that instructors who were active in starting up AODs on average terminated up with shorter AODs than did instructors who left it to the learners to start up discussions. An instructor-led AOD could also result in a ‘‘crutch mentality’’ among the learners due to their dependence on the instructor to start, orient, and end up the AODs (Hew, 2015). Contrary to the previously mentioned studies, some other studies supported the value of nonmoderated AODs (e.g., Galanouli & Collins, 2000). Omitting moderation has some drawbacks such as students’ engagement in off task discussions and feeling a sense of confusion due to the lack of guidance (Light, Nesbitt, Light, & White, 2000). Although Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) in their community of inquiry (COI) model allocated most of moderation activities to instructors, they acknowledged that teaching presence can also be gained through a meaningful interaction among students. Therefore, it is not very surprising to hear some scholars advocating the use of students as moderators of AODs. Peer moderation of asynchronous online discussions Based on Tagg (1994, p. 45), “a direction from within” approach requires a reconsideration of facilitation roles that are traditionally linked to ‘leadership’ and gives students the power to take practical and meaningful roles in the online classroom. Tagg (1994) was the first one who assigned his students conference-moderating role

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 in AODs. Correia and Davis (2007) found that peer moderation was the most popular collaboration design preferred by online learners that created a strong sense of community. Results of previous research on peer moderation have suggested that students felt more comfortable vocalizing their views, brainstorming for ideas, and challenging one another’s ideas in a peer-moderated AOD (Cheung & Hew, 2008; Rourke & Anderson, 2002). This seems consistent with Poole’s (2000) analysis which proposed that students post longer and more messages when in peer-moderated AODs. However, the relationship between moderator’s frequency of moderation techniques and group participation in AODs is conditioned by the types of moderation supports enacted by peer moderators (Hew & Cheung, 2008; Ng et al., 2009). Although the majority of the research addressed usefulness of peer moderation, there is comparatively little research done that directly addresses actual types of student- or peer emoderation supports or behaviors in Asian cultures to sustain denser AODs.

value near 0 is a “sparsely-knit” network with no or little connections, while a network with 1 density value is considered as “fully-dense” network in which participants are linked and connected to one another (Shen, Nuankhieo, Huang, Amelung, & Laffey, 2008). In a supportive and healthy peer-moderated AOD which is highly dense, one would reasonably expect to find a high level of interactivity in communication throughout the group. The density has been chosen for this study because it is believed that the goal of AODs is to enable students to have discussion with diverse others (Hewitt, 2005). Measuring the density of AODs can provide a way to see if conversational exchanges or discussions are taking place among various members (Dennen, 2008). Merely counting the depth of student postings would not indicate disjointed students and whether conversational exchanges among all students are happening. This study investigated types of peer e-moderation supports that increased participation and density in AODs.

Density in asynchronous online discussions There are two basic forms of participation quantity in AODs- posting and non-posting- also labeled as writing and reading (Xie et al., 2014). However, the main problem with these two methods is that the structures of relationships between the participants are ignored. One analytical method for detecting participation structures or patterns is social network analysis (SNA), an approach that has been recently utilized by Finnish researchers (e.g., Hakkarainen & Palonen, 2003; Lipponen, Rahikainen, Lallimo, & Hakkarainen, 2003). SNA examines “the interpersonal transactions that constitute the social structure of a group” (Friedkin & Slater, 1994, p, 139). Among SNA indicators such as centrality, density, share, and reciprocity, ‘density’ is significant underlying considerations in the development of a supportive and healthy community of learners (Xie et al., 2014). Density describes the general level of linkage among members (point) in a social network, group or an AOD (Xie et al., 2014). Density is a ratio that is measured through division of the number of actual communicative links available in a network by the number of possible links in the network which varies between 0 and 1 (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). A network or group with a density

3. Method This exploratory qualitative case study aimed at examination of e-moderation supports used by peer moderators to promote participation and density in AODs, using quantitative content analysis (De Smet, Van Keer, & Valcke, 2008). According to Merriam (1998), a case study methodology is used when the researcher seeks to gain an in-depth understanding of a particular situation. The study relied on two primary sources of data: (a) student logs files, and (b) online observations of the students’ discussion.

Participants The participants for this research were chosen from 84 students in a blended undergraduate course being offered during first semester 2013/2014 in Educational Studies Faculty at a large research public university in Malaysia. The course “information communication and technology for primary school” was a fundamental course that covered various instructional designs models and how to apply each model to the educational practice and run eleven weeks in length. Procedure

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 A total of 84 students who agreed to participate were assigned randomly into 12 groups of 7 students. During a complete semester, students acted as peer moderators of AODs, in stable groups of seven members. Basically, the peer moderation was reciprocal in nature (De Backer, Van Keer, & Valcke, 2012). Within reciprocal peer moderation the moderator role is switched among students, giving equal chances to all students to benefit from peer moderator and responder role (Falchikov & Blythman, 2001). Students participated in seven-weekly discussions which accounted 20% of their final course grade. Seven topics were set up by course instructor being evaluated to be very similar in terms of structure and difficulty. One week before each discussion, one student from each group was randomly assigned peer moderator role who received an email attached with discussion topic and two validated functional guidelines, the same for all assigned peer moderators of the same week. The functional guidelines were designed based on the procedure of peer-tutor training proposed by De Wever, Van Keer, Schellens, and Valcke (2010) and partly on the literature mentioned in their study. So, peer moderators were responsible to perform five main tasks, including access and motivation, socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction, and development. AODs were fully moderated by peer moderators with no instructor intervention.

the target university. For the purpose of our study, we looked at the density of AODs. As measurement of density, first, all the AOD activities in this course archived in LMS database were collected and then Structured Query Language (SQL) queries were performed to extract peer-to-peer interaction data with timestamps from the database. The resulting records were kept in Microsoft Excel® 2007 and then actor-by-actor matrix also called “Sociomatrice” (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005) for each AOD period was developed using PrivotTable feature of the Microsoft Excel®. Sociomatrices were then imported to UCINET® 6 (Borgatti, 2002) which is a SNA package to perform data analysis. Using UCINET, density score of each AOD was computed. Then Sociomatrices were imported to NetDraw 2 to draw sociograms of each AOD (see Figure 1). We opted for a density sore above the mean density score because such a level suggests that a discussion is taking place among various members of the group and discussion is interactive. Using the above criterion, of the 84 AOD forums in this study (12 groups × 7 topics = 84) we found 35 AODs that achieved a density above the mean density score (0.31). Peer moderators posted an average of 10.08 posts (SD = 4.96; n = 353) that amounted to 25.80% of total posts, while students’ contributions were an average of 29.00 (SD = 11.91, n = 1015) that contributed 74.20% of the total postings analyzed in these 35 AODs. It is apparent from Table 1 that there were 15 (42.86%) AODs that achieved a density of 32-41, 6 (17.14%) with 42-51 density, 10 (28.57%) with 52-61 density, and 4 (11.43%) with 62 or more density score

Data analysis Data source contained log files and discussion transcripts of student-led AODs. AODs took place in PutraLMS, the learning management system of . Table 1. Distribution of the asynchronous online discussions based on density score AOD density 32-41 42-51 52-61 62≤ Total

Number 15 6 10 4 35

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Percentage (%) 42.86 17.14 28.57 11.43 100.00


Network density = .714 Group 1, Week 2









756



























Network density = .333 Group 8 Week 4

Figure 1. Asynchronous online discussion forums with density score above 0.31 (from left to right is highest to lowest densities)

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 We used Smet, Keer, Wever, and Valcke’s (2010) rubric of peer e-moderation to guide our content analysis procedure. This rubric was developed based on Salmon (2000) five-step e-moderation model. Specifically, framework consists of five emoderation behaviors with 17 indicators. We chose to use “unit of meaning” in a message as the unit of analysis because moderating is a multidimensional activity and contributions of peer moderators can reflect varied categories within a single message. Posting messages by peer moderators in selected AODs were codified by two trained coders except researcher. Following Strijbos, Martens, Prins, and Jochems’s (2006)

suggestion, a procedural distinction was made between segmentation and coding process. First, coders received training on segmentation procedure followed by application of the 17 subcategories in Smet et al.’ (2010) coding scheme. After the training exercise, 353 contributions from peer moderators were coded independently by coders through the mentioned procedure. The two hour training resulted in an acceptable level of agreement between the coders with Cohen Kappa of 0.82 (Neuendorf, 2002). Table 2 describes the coding categories with examples of raw data for each category.

Table 2. Coding scheme Category

Indicator of peer moderator’s behaviour

Examples

Access and motivation

Clarifying the peer moderator role

- I am Madihah, the leader for this first week. Be present by tonight so we can present the project we have selected for our group. - Please upload your PDP using the attachment icon. - I believe that you all have good views to share in the issue. So make it open to all. - I miss it again this time. I have to take my child to the clinic. The three of them had a fever in one time. - Thank you and congratulations on your advice and good reviews. A rapid response to the views and friends suggestion. CONGRATULATIONS. - Forgive me my friends if I add too much on your comments. - The next objective of the ICT awareness campaign conducted in school is to build a strong network between the school and parents in order … - Here, apart from raising funds, we can find information on the importance of increased effectiveness of ICT use in PdP. … - Since there are no more time on this topic, as a strategy, before anything discuss “Building a Computer Lab” or “Developing or Upgrading the Computer Lab”. - What my friend Aida said means that for guiding and educating teachers in the use of ICT in teaching and learning we need expertise. - So, I would like to ask something: is setting up a second computer lab in school considered an upgrade or a new proposed project? - After went through all of the views and

Being accessible to computer-related problems Encouraging participation Socialization

Informal conversation Express of appreciate

Showing commitment Information exchange

Modelling the contents by expressing personal belief or value Bringing in other content information Organizational management Breaking the learning task

Explaining the learning task

Knowledge construction

Asking for content explanation and clarification

Asking to summarize

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Giving feedback about learning and social processes to both the individuals and the group Development

Call for further reflection Elaboration Playing devil’s advocate. For example, positing ‘what if’ questions

4. Results Within the 353 messages (mean = 10.08, SD = 2.82) posted by peer moderators, 12467 units of meanings (mean = 35.60, SD = 12.42) were recognized by the coders. As can be driven from Table 3, the mean number of units of analysis

opinions made by you guys here, here I list down all program objectives that we have chosen: 1. To … 2. To… - Allow me to comment on the views of my friend, Datin Salmah. Indeed, a network needs to exist between teachers and parents. - If parents see that the use of ICT in PDP is negatively influencing their children, will they support what we are doing? - Having above mentioned thoughts in mind, please discuss the importance of ICT in not schools but also in organizations. - If we were children, Do still we expect the same sorts of vehicles?

coded as access and motivation, socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction, and development were 3.17 (SD = 1.67, n = 111), 5.88 (SD = 2.78, n = 206), 13.03 (SD = 4.56, n = 456), 12.06 (SD = 5.77, n = 422), and 1.46 (SD = 1.22, n = 51), respectively.

Table 3. Descriptive data for occurrence of the five categories in e-moderation model of Salmon (2000) identified within the moderators’ post

Number Mean SD

Access and motivation

Socialization

Information exchange

Knowledge construction

Development

111 3.17 1.67

206 5.88 2.78

456 13.03 4.56

422 12.06 5.77

51 1.46 11.22

Figure 1 displays a schematic overview of the occurrence of the five steps of e-moderation behaviors. In general, peer moderators appear to use a variety of moderating activities. A high proportion of peer moderators’ behaviors focused on information exchange. Of 36.60% of the units of meaning within peer moderators, they focused on planning, separating and explaining the learning content, bringing in additional sources, and modeling the discussion. They paid attention to

asking different types of questions and tried to facilitate students’ knowledge construction in 33.87% of their units of meaning. In about 16.53% of units of meaning in peer moderators’ postings, they showed clear social commitment and encouraged participation. About 8.91% and 4.09% of units of meanings in peer moderators’ postings were coded as access and motivation and development, respectively. It appears that peer moderators stimulate development support to a lower extent.

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Figure 4.6: Percentage of the occurrence of the various levels in e-moderation Discussion Building on the prior research statement that relationship between quantity of peer moderators’ participation and group performance is conditioned by the quality of moderators’ messages (Hew & Cheung, 2008; Ng et al., 2009), the main aim of this research was to explore types of e-moderation supports that are important for group density. More specifically, all five e-moderating roles: motivator, social supporter, information deliverer, knowledge constructor, and challenger for personal development were found to be adapted by peer moderators to facilitate their discussions. However, information exchange and knowledge construction were dominant moderating approaches, in opposition to the rather limited occurrence of moderation support focusing on the personal development. The enduring occurrence of knowledge construction and information exchange supports contradicts the work of De Smet, Van Keer, and Valcke (2009), highlighting the predominance of social and motivational supports in peer-tutored CSCL. However, this finding confirms the findings of De Smet et al. (2008) who found information exchange as the predominance e-moderation behavior by peer-tutors. The performance of moderating behaviors of access and motivation and socialization helped peer moderators to foster stronger sense of rapport within groups which is aimed at creating a positive atmosphere where group members feel comfortable interacting with one another. GairínSallán et al. (2010) mentioned that “the key to a moderator’s success is motivating people to participate” (p. 307). In addition, in his case study, Jameson (2009) found that in online discussion that leader neglected to cultivate relational

intelligence between members; the discussion was aggressive with no density among group members. Setting ground rules is an indicator of access and motivation support that has been found to be effective in eliminating the problem of procrastination (Hew & Cheung, 2008). There are three forms of ground rules: (a) ground rules for organizing posting, (b) ground rules for appropriate behavior, and (c) ground rules for participation (Hew & Cheung, 2008). In the context of this study, peer moderators provided only explicit ground rules for accessing and posting to the discussion forums [(required students to reply to someone as quick as possible, within a certain amount of time (e.g., 24 h)]; a finding that echoes what Xie et al. (2014) advocated. There was no evidence of other types of ground roles. Moreover, appreciation and encouraging people to contribute is one of the critical indicators of socialization support that is found to be linked with students’ satisfaction in AODs and feeling that their contributions were worthy enough to be noticed. Appreciation provides a respectful environment that can help reduce the possibility that a contributor’s personal self-image is threatened (Hew & Hara, 2007). As Hew and Cheung (2008) mentioned, acknowledging participants can be done individually or on the base of the group. In the context of this study, it was mostly done through the entire group rather than personally inviting people to contribute. Information exchange support constituted the bulk of moderating supports encountered in AODs with density score of thirty two or more. The predominance in modeling support is in line with Hew and Cheung’s (2011) findings, who proposed

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 “providing own opinion” as the most frequently used technique by peer facilitators of groups with higher knowledge construction occurrences. They stressed that a certain number of opinion-related postings are critical in order to function as staring point to ground the rest of the online discussion. A closer look at this technique showed that peer moderators used this technique in two ways: (a) to express his/her personal opinion whether he/she was in agreement or not with a particular students, and (b) to respond to entire group without any particular audience. Knowledge construction technique also constituted the bulk of moderating supports. Among indicators of knowledge construction support, questioning has been surfaced as possible factor that may promote growth of AODs (Chan et al., 2009; Hew & Cheung, 2008). Of the five category of questioning proposed by Paul (1990), one was found in our study- questions about view points to foster a sense of obligation on the part of other group members and to probe others opinion to a particular issue. This result confirms prior studies (Kienle & Ritterskamp, 2007; Lowes, Lin, & Wang, 2007), indicating that participants would be more likely to offer new information if the moderator questions or challenges them instead of giving them information. In this line of research Hew and Cheung (2008) suggested that question should be toward the end of the message rather than in front to be more potential in attracting students’ participation in AODs. Moreover, summarizing is the other critical indicator of knowledge construction support that provides a short description of the main points or ideas and is a useful behavior to reduce cognitive load in AODs. However, it should be combined with questioning technique to prevent early AOD’s termination (Chan et al., 2009). Development support was not found to be a relevant support in high density AODs. It can be concluded that peer moderators’ supporting behaviors do not evolve to the last e-moderating stage. Suggesting new direction for discussion with the intention of stimulating ideas was seldom performed. The period might have been too short for moderators to be able to focus on personal development stage. Similarly, result from this study follows the line of research of De Smet et al. (2008) who reported that e-moderating support in development phase is virtually absent. It suggests

that peer moderation may not lead to developmental changes in students’ contributions without support from the course instructor. Further examination of quality measurement of AODs and visualization of networks revealed two main findings - evolution in model/coach and centrality point. As defined by Mason (1991), the process of scaffolding and fading tends to be a process of moving from explicit (modeling) to indirect prompts (coaching) to encourage students to spontaneously use and integrate useful ways of thinking into their own functioning. Using distinction between explicit and indirect emoderation, it was found that in the first three days peer moderators focused on information exchange supports (direct inputs such as providing own idea) and then declined their postings conveying modeling properties to indirect input such as asking for others viewpoints in order to create chances for other group members to become independent learners and contribute their knowledge. This tendency resulted in great number of responses from different students. This finding can be understood in light of evolution from model to coach aspect of e-moderation (De Backer et al., 2012). A further look at the networks of AODs (see Figures 1), it was perceived that the centrality of the moderators in the AOD play a significant role in determining the density. Centrality is the extent to which a person is in the centre of a network showing the number of links (ties) outgoing from a person (outdegree) or incoming to a person (indegree) (Friedkin & Slater, 1994). As it can be seen in all AODs, the moderators (represented by green node) are part of an interconnected network characterized by multiple points of centrality. This result corroborates results of qualitative measurements and confirms the fact that effective leaders fade their moderation to allow other students’ to exchange, elaborate and challenge each other’s ideas and hence bound relationships. Interconnected networks are suggested to be more conducive for collaboration and knowledge construction (Zhu, 2006). The results obtained in this part corroborate prior study (Mehra, Dixon, Brass, & Robertson, 2006). Literatures has also compared the functions and profiles of moderators with those of teachers (Anderson et al., 2001; De Smet et al., 2008); in our case, we can see some similarities between the

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The 3rd International Conference on Educational Research And Practice 2015 leadership styles outlined by Huang, Kahai, and Jestice (2010) and the moderation behaviors in peer-moderated AODs studied. Huang et al. (2010) mentioned that effective leaders must engage in both transformational and transactional interactions. The tasks of transformational leadership are similar to access and motivation and socialization e-moderating behaviors whereas transactional leadership activities are similar to information exchange, knowledge construction and development e-moderating behaviors. It can also be concluded that peer moderators of selected AODs performed both transactional and transformational leaderships and their moderating interventions evolved from talk elucidating lowest phases in the Salmon’ model to contributions stimulating development. Findings of this study support the suggestion made by leadership researchers that a combination of transformational and transactional leadership styles is vital for team performance (Bass, Avolio, Jung, & Berson, 2003). Even through the current case study we cannot determine actual casual effects of moderation techniques on AODs’ density due to lack of control treatment, simply stated, it is inferred that development of density among group members can be fostered mainly through two moderation behaviors: knowledge construction, information exchange and socialization. Moreover, effective peer moderators are capable of conducting evolution in their e-moderation over time (Caperchione, Mummery, & Duncan, 2011). The data also suggests that, as indicators of knowledge construction, information exchange, and socialization moderating supports; questioning, providing own opinion to individuals, and appreciation were among the most useful strategies used by peer moderators, respectively. 6. Implications Taking notes from De Smet et al. (2008) assertion that “each new discussion theme requires a mixture of all types of peer tutor support as distinguished in the e-moderating model of Salmon (2000)” (p. 219), and based on the results of the current study indicating enactment of all moderating behaviors by peer moderators in AODs with density score

above the mean density score, in training prospective Asian Pacific peer moderators they need to be trained and cognizant to follow each step of e-moderation model. Supported by Salmon’s (2000) five-step model, student moderators need to start lower-stages of emoderating behaviors and evolves gradually to the higher-stages of moderation to grant success of AODs (Salmon, 2000). However, once rapport was build among group members, more attention must be devoted on two moderation techniques: information exchange and knowledge construction specially using of providing own opinion and questioning strategies. It is also helpful to create discussion summaries but combined with questioning to prevent early tread termination. 7. Limitation and future research There were some limitations of this study that might have influenced the results and need to be addressed in future studies. First, we used only quantitative approach in collecting students’ online participation. Further research should explore how peer moderation behaviors affect on the quality of students’ online participation (e.g., knowledge construction and cognitive achievement). Moreover, time series analysis may also aid in investigating the flow of peer moderators emoderation support. This type of analysis could look at the point at which moderators begin to post different types of supports throughout the semester and determine the probability that these kinds of supports will continue. Secondly, all participants included in the study were undergraduate students in education major. Moreover, the particular course being examined was a blended one which contained of both F2F and online components. Future research should try to replicate the findings with participants from other field of study, larger population, fully online courses, or subject pools with greater demographic diversity. Thirdly, the moderators in the current study received training using Salmon’s (2000) e-moderation model to facilitate groups’ discussions. Subsequent research should also determine the impact that different types of trainings might have on patterns in emoderation supports.

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