Visualmail+ as a Dialogue-Oriented Forum: An Empirical Case About Cooperation and Learning

This study experimentally tested whether cooperation among participants increases when they use a forum application with added functionalities derived from the language-Action and situated-Action perspectives compared with participating in a forum without such features. We used two versions of a visual-based forum application that included functionalities to visualize the threads of an argumentation the first one is called VisualMail, and the situated language-Action enriched-forum is called VisualMail+ a total of 84 college students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of 20 different groups. Subsequently, these groups were randomly assigned to use VisualMail or VisualMail+ the results indicate that using VisualMail+ significantly increases cooperation among participants compared with VisualMail, with a large effect size (d = 1.01). © 2020 IEEE.