While there is agreement that participation in online asynchronous discussions can enhance student learning, it has also been identified that there is a need to investigate the impact on student course performance of participation in online discussions. This paper presents a case study based on an undergraduate engineering management unit employing a formally assessed online discussion area. It was observed that while many students read a significant number of discussion postings, generally, the posting of new and reply messages occurred at the minimum level required to qualify for the assignment marks. Based on correlation and multiple regression analysis, it was observed that two variables were significantly related to a student's final unit mark -prior academic ability and the number of new postings made to the online discussion. Each new posting contributed three times as much to the final unit mark as its nominal assessment value, suggesting that the work in preparing their new discussion postings assisted students in the completion of a range of assessable tasks for the unit. The number of postings read was not significantly correlated with the final unit mark, suggesting that passive lurking in this online discussion did not significantly contribute to student learning outcomes. Dialogue is considered to be an essential element of human learning, particularly for distance education (Gorsky & Caspi, 2005) . It includes interactions between students and teachers, exchanges between students, interactions between students and others not directly involved in their learning processes and dialogue with oneself in the form of reflective thought (Webb, Jones, Barker & van Schaik, 2004) . With the advent of online technologies in teaching and learning, particularly in distance education, the use of online discussion forums is now a widespread medium for learning dialogue. Online discussion can be synchronous through the use of real-time chat tools, but many examples of online discussions documented in the literature present the use of asynchronous discussion. That is, where students post new and follow-up messages to an electronic bulletin-board at the times that suit them, and not necessarily at the same time that other students are accessing the discussion system. The claimed benefits of online asynchronous discussion forums include:
In other work that looked at a formally assessed discussion forum (in which participation was required for a course grade), most students posted only the minimum amount required to obtain course credit, and the number of new posts to the forum was positively associated with final grade REF .
Does the discussion help? The impact of a formally assessed online discussion on final student results
BJET
BJET
Computer Science