Motivating Knowledge Seeking and Sharing Behavior in the Online Discussion Forum

Abstract

This study developed an online discussion forum that motivate students’ knowledge seeking and sharing. The forum enables students post questions anonymously and provides a question or response prompt that invite students to engage in the discussion after completing a quiz. A quasi-experimental approach was conducted with a sample of 100 students. The results indicated that the students in the experimental group exhibited more active participation in knowledge seeking and sharing, as well as showed a higher density of group’s social network. The findings provide some evidence for the value of the motivational design, in terms of anonymous questioning and prompt features, to address the challenge of under-contribution in online discussion forums.