Understanding and Designing Online Environments for Research Student Communities: Evidence from Peer Support Communities on Twitter, Reddit, and Microsoft Teams

Abstract

This thesis explores postgraduate research students' learning communities formed through social media and communication technologies. With the increasing prevalence of social media and digital communication, a growing number of students and professionals participate in online communities on social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and YouTube), Internet forums (e.g., Reddit, Quora, and Stack Overflow), messaging applications (e.g., Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams), etc. to share their experience and knowledge. However, the impact of technology affordances on the development of these student-initiated communities in the long run has remained under-researched in the field of education. This thesis addresses the gap by empirically investigating online communities formed by research students, which include a small higher degree by research (HDR) students' community on Microsoft Teams and two large doctoral communities on Twitter and Reddit based on 16-year historical data. To provide tools for educators, researchers, and practitioners in the field of educational technology, this thesis also constructs an Avatar-Mediated Multi-Identity Model for designing collaborative online environments to support students based on the literature of social psychology and computer-mediated communication. The findings contribute to the understanding of the impacts of online platform features on research students' social interaction and their online communities. Moreover, this thesis makes a methodological contribution through demonstrating how large volumes of data can be feasibly sourced from social media to gain insights into students' perspectives and peer interactions, as well as the ethical procedures when using social media data for research. Considering the complexities associated with collecting and analysing large-scale data within this domain, this thesis will be of considerable value for the educational research community.