Exploring the Influential Factors on Graduate Students’ Motivation in Participating in Online Discussion Boards: STD and TAM

One of the biggest challenges in online education is the diminished sense of relatedness compared to a traditional classroom setting. This lack of social connection can negatively affect students’ motivation and overall educational experience. In order to address this challenge, this study looks at discussion board participation in online classrooms through the lenses of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations by incorporating self-determination theory (SDT) and the technology acceptance model (TAM). This study proposes to distinguish two categories of relatedness: relatedness-peer and relatedness-instructor. The study includes 154 graduate students from a land-grant university who have enrolled in asynchronous classes. Participants filled out a questionnaire assessing STD, TAM, and the proposed relatedness subscale factors of relatedness-peer and relatedness-instructor. The results of exploratory factor analyses support the notion that relatedness is indeed a two-dimensional construct. The findings from the multivariate regression analysis also reveal that relatedness significantly influenced motivations. In contrast, discussion board experience and ease of use did not have a significant predictive impact on either type of motivation. Study implications, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed.

It is noteworthy that all factors of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) display a significant positive correlation with enjoyment and usefulness—except for competence, which lacks a significant relationship with usefulness (H2a). Therefore H1a, H1b, H2b, H3a, H3b, H4a and H4b are all supported. The findings suggest that students who perceive higher levels of autonomy, competence, relatedness-peer, and relatedness-instructor tend to experience greater enjoyment in discussion board activities. In terms of perceived usefulness, students with higher perceptions of autonomy, relatedness-peer, and relatedness-instructor report greater usefulness, whereas the impact of competence on perceived usefulness is not as pronounced. Notably, the effect of both relatedness factors on enjoyment and usefulness is stronger than all of the other factors’ effects

In terms of the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study anticipated that ease of use and discussion board experience would impact motivation. Intriguingly, neither of these factors seemed to influence either usefulness or enjoyment. This could be due to students’ long-term use of and familiarity with discussion board functionality. Generally, ease of use is assessed immediately after participants attempt a task. Asking participants to reflect retrospectively could potentially diminish the reliability of self-reported results, leading to a lack of strong attitudes toward the interface.

Furthermore, participants were given the opportunity to express their thoughts on features that could enhance discussion boards through an open-ended question at the end of the survey. The participants’ comments provided valuable insights related to the research variables, such as,
Autonomy:

“Variety of content. When all students write on the same topic it’s monotonous and doesn’t encourage reading each post.”

“Non mandatory posting. Or no forced responses”

“Choosing our own topics of interest”

Relatedness/Competence:

“Ability to like or agree with someone else’s response without writing out a reply”

“emojis for others to use to quickly express how they feel about your response”

“A “Like” feature for messages would be nice.”

“Tagging people in replies and posts”

“Voting feature”

“YES! Notification when someone replies to your post is needed. It would provide an opportunity to have conversations.”

“The long running list of replies and comments were too long and messy to read. I probably missed some great insights because there was just too much to look at or consume.”

Usefulness:

“I find discussion boards to be an unnecessary and unhelpful part of class, except for the purpose of student introductions.”