Student involvement with online forum and its effects on intention to seek and intention to share: An exploratory study

Abstract

Online forum is a popular approach for sharing of ideas and problem resolution. It is a very useful tool for education where students and lecturers can communicate with each other without time and space constraints. This paper presents an exploratory study to investigate students' involvement with online forum, which in turn may affect their intention to seek answers and share ideas. The Social Exchange Theory is one of the theoretical backgrounds to explain online participation as a reciprocal exchange of information. Benefit and cost of online forum are two independent variables. Intention to seek answer and intention to share idea are two dependent variables. Involvement and attitude play as mediating variables. Eight hypotheses were proposed, and all of them were confirmed by the data. One finding reveals that the effects of involvement on intention to share ideas and on intention to seek answers are partially mediated by the respective attitudes. Empirical and practical contributions are discussed at the end of this paper.