Supporting Interaction Outside of Class: Anchored Discussions vs. Discussion Boards

Newsgroups and online discussion boards have long been used to supplement class discussions.  We describe a study comparing the use of two systems, WebAnn and EPost, to support class discussion of technical papers in a graduate course.  WebAnn is a shared annotation system that supports anchored discussions on web pages, and allows users to easily associate comments with a particular paragraph, phrase, or word in the paper being discussed.  EPost is a high-quality conventional discussion board system.  In our study, students contributed almost twice as much to the online discussion using WebAnn. WebAnn also encouraged a different discussion style, focused on specific points in the paper. We expected WebAnn discussions to serve as a starting point for in-depth discussions in the classroom; but in fact, online discussions often competed with classroom discussions. We conclude with implications of the study for technology design and the process of its use.