Online discussion forums as tools for developing students’ soft skills: the mediating role of community knowledge

Abstract

Higher education institutions are now under pressure to produce graduates who, in addition to subject-specific knowledge, have mastered a range of cross-disciplinary skills — such as communication, critical thinking and collaboration — collectively referred to as ‘soft skills’. The widespread adoption of digital learning platforms, accelerated by the COVID-19 health crisis, has placed discussion forums at the heart of the everyday student experience, yet their actual contribution to the development of these skills has not been sufficiently documented. This article examines the relationship between participation in a forum and the development of these three skills, positing the hypothesis that this relationship is not direct but mediated by the emergence of communal knowledge — that is, a collective construct negotiated within a learning community.

The study is based on a re-analysis of the corpus we compiled as part of doctoral research focusing on the ways in which knowledge is constructed and validated in digital environments. This corpus brings together three contrasting platforms: a university MOOC, a Moodle platform linked to a bachelor’s degree module, and an informal Facebook group for learning French. The categories of discourse developed during the initial research were recoded as indicators of cross-curricular skills, and then compared across the different contexts.

The results show that participation does not automatically lead to the development of skills. In the informal, unmoderated setting, 76 per cent of contributions fall within the playful and socio-emotional register: sociability develops without the exercise of critical thinking. In the formal, lightly scripted setting, interactions remain declarative, and only the transition to a shared writing space triggers genuine collaboration. In the heavily scripted setting, all three skills are evident, but only amongst an active minority. The distinguishing factor is neither the technology nor the volume of exchanges, but the existence of a shared object of knowledge on which participants agree to negotiate.

Keywords: discussion forum; soft skills; community knowledge; collaborative learning; socio-cognitive conflict; socio-technical mediation.

Received Date: August 17, 2026

Accepted Date: September 09, 2026

Published Date: October 01, 2026

Available Online at: https://www.ijsrisjournal.com/index.php/ojsfiles/article/view/987