Emotional Engagement in Online Forums: Three Patterns That Shape Participation

By Student Voice AI

Published Feb 13, 2026 · Updated Feb 13, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we think "student engagement" is often treated as a metric when it is really a lived experience: students deciding whether it feels safe, worthwhile, and socially meaningful to participate. In a recent paper in Active Learning in Higher Education, Sarah Prestridge explores how students conceptualise their emotions when engaging in online asynchronous forums. We'll summarise what the study found, and why it matters for universities that rely on student voice data to improve learning and belonging. [Paper Source]

Context and research question

As more teaching, support, and peer learning happens in digital spaces, universities have to manage a familiar challenge in a new setting: how to design environments that encourage honest, constructive participation. Asynchronous forums are a common tool for discussion, reflection, and peer support, but they can also become low-participation spaces where only a few voices are heard.

Prestridge's study asks, in effect: how do students understand their own emotions while participating in asynchronous forums, and how do those emotions shape what they do (or do not) contribute? The focus is not on platform features alone, but on the social and emotional dynamics that drive learning behaviour.

Methodologically, the paper uses a case study approach over a six-week fully online module, using a framework that brings together social, emotional, and online learning dimensions.

This review is based on the paper's abstract and bibliographic metadata available via the DOI.

Key findings

The headline result is that emotional engagement in forums is not a single thing. Students' behaviour reflects different emotional stances towards risk, self-presentation, and community.

Three types of behaviours were found represented as self-protective, self-oriented and community-oriented.

First, self-protective engagement reflects caution. Students may read and learn, but hold back from posting when they anticipate judgement, conflict, or "getting it wrong" in public. For UK HE teams, this should ring familiar: low response rates or thin participation can be a signal about perceived psychological safety, not only about motivation.

Second, self-oriented engagement captures participation that is primarily instrumental. Students contribute to meet requirements, demonstrate competence, or move their own learning forward, but with limited investment in peer exchange. This can still be productive, but it can also mean that the forum functions more like an individual assignment submission channel than a social learning space.

Third, community-oriented engagement describes contributions that respond to peers, build shared understanding, and treat the forum as a collective space. From a student experience perspective, this is the behaviour pattern most closely aligned with belonging: students are not only consuming content, but also signalling "we are learning together".

The paper also links these behaviours to what students perceive as "social and emotional behaviours" in relation to content, peer interaction, and the forum environment itself. In practical terms, students interpret the same forum through multiple lenses at once: the task, the audience, and the norms.

Practical implications

For universities, the most useful takeaway is that improving online forum participation is not only a moderation or UX problem. It is a design problem that includes norms, assessment signals, and the emotional risk of being visible.

Here are pragmatic ways to apply the findings in UK HE contexts:

Design for psychological safety early. Make expectations explicit (what good participation looks like, how disagreement is handled, and what staff will do when posts go unanswered). If students default to self-protective behaviour, they may never "warm up" later.
Separate "compliance posting" from "community building". If participation is assessed, consider low-stakes structures that reward constructive peer interaction (responding, clarifying, building on others) rather than volume alone, which can increase self-oriented posting.
Use student voice data to monitor forum health. Module evaluation comments, pulse surveys, and learning analytics often contain the clues: students will describe forums as intimidating, pointless, or supportive long before it shows in metrics. This is a good fit for text analysis, because signals are typically scattered across lots of small comments.
Bridge insight to action with consistent reporting. Student Voice Analytics can help student experience and teaching teams track themes like belonging, confidence, support, and peer interaction across cohorts, and spot when forum experiences are becoming a barrier rather than a support.

FAQ

Q: How can we encourage more community-oriented participation in asynchronous forums?

A: Start by reducing the perceived cost of posting. Use a clear "welcome thread" with norms, seed early discussion with prompts that do not have a single correct answer, and model the tone you want (acknowledge contributions, link ideas together, and show that uncertainty is acceptable). If participation is assessed, reward behaviours that build learning with peers (responses, synthesis, helpful questions) rather than simply counting posts.

Q: What if students engage silently (reading) but rarely post?

A: Treat "silent engagement" as meaningful data, not failure. Students may be learning while remaining self-protective. Triangulate forum metrics with student voice sources such as short pulse surveys and open-text prompts (e.g. "What stops you posting?"). If comments cluster around anxiety, fear of judgement, or unclear expectations, the intervention is about safety and norms; if they cluster around workload or low value, it is about design and purpose.

Q: What does this mean for interpreting student voice in online learning more broadly?

A: It reinforces that participation patterns are shaped by emotion and context, not only by "effort". When students say they feel disconnected, hesitant, or unsupported, those statements often map to concrete behaviours: not posting, not responding, or treating peer spaces as transactional. Analysing free-text comments alongside engagement indicators can help teams distinguish between low engagement caused by overload and low engagement caused by perceived risk or weak belonging.

References

[Paper Source]: Sarah Prestridge "Conceptualising Emotional Engagement in an Online Asynchronous Forum" DOI: 10.1177/14697874251411551

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