Dive Brief:

• Data harvested from Coursera suggests that the presence of an instructor in online discussion forums may hurt student participation.
• Researchers were analyzing the amount of discussion throughout the course and trying to determine what caused discussion to decrease.
• They also say that small talk can drown out useful posts; as much as 30% of the threads were small talk.

Dive Insight:

The researchers actually developed a system that filters out small-talk in order to highlight the useful posts. Perhaps creating a separate forum for such posts would be as effective? It's not that there's no place for it, it's just that — as in conventional classrooms — when it's out of place, it can be disruptive. The researchers' complete findings can be found here.