Analysis of an online course in "Teaching Biology": interaction and communication in forums

Over the last four years our group has set up an online course in teaching Biology for students attending the Primary Education Degree Course. The objective of the online course is to improve teaching and learning of Biology during the professional training of primary school teachers who will teach science-related subjects to children. The course is realized as a learning environment which encourages student collaboration and co-operation. Students discuss in forums on different subjects (e.g. cells, seeds, insects, mushrooms, water environments, etc.), share their personal experiences and ask the tutor for help. On our course the interactions that develop on the forums, closely related to a dynamic communication, play an important role for our students. Therefore we set up a method that could properly analyse the shared messages: we defined the quality indicators and calculated the average number of points per student. We began to trial this method in order to analyse the relationships between messages as well as the relationship between tutor and students.