Questioning skills facilitate online synchronous discussions

The results of this study show that effective questioning skills increase student intellectual moves that, in turn, facilitate the process of knowledge construction in online synchronous discussion (OSD). The open-ended questions elicited multiple perspectives by promoting student participation, while OSD enabled them to share and debate multiple perspectives simultaneously without worrying about interrupting the flow of a conversation that had moved on. Furthermore, the high level of questions engaged students in higher order thinking. That is, OSD can be productive for learning when organised with appropriate questioning skills. The implication is that educators have to re-engineer their thinking to teach with OSD in order to discover effective pedagogy that uses OSD as an integral component in teaching. Research on educational OSD should focus on how and when it is an appropriate learning tool that enhances learning processes and outcomes.