ABSTRACT
The Internet has changed the landscape of higher education by transforming its traditional processes. Applications of technological developments have changed the face of higher education by replacing the passive teacher-centered approaches with more active learning-focused ways of delivering knowledge. This chapter focuses on the evaluation of asynchronous online discussion, which is an important component in online learning because it compensates for the absence of the weekly, face-to-face interactions that occur in a traditional classroom learning environment. In order to demonstrate the application of an effective evaluation approach for understanding and improving the quality of asynchronous online discussion, the chapter presents a discussion on an ethical scenario as an assignment in a graduate-level online course. The first step to evaluating an online course is to identify the pedagogical quality (qualities) that should be achieved. As described by O'Donnell (2006), peer collaboration is 'an important contributor to the students' conceptual development' and there is a variety of explanations for such influence.
