What is it about?
Online courses often have many students who read discussions without ever posting, these students are commonly called "lurkers" and are typically assumed to be disengaged. But is that really true? This study looked beyond what students do (posting vs. reading) to examine how they feel, specifically, how connected, comfortable, and acknowledged they feel in their online course community. By analyzing survey responses from over 2,300 graduate students alongside their forum activity, we discovered that "lurkers" are not all the same. They naturally cluster into distinct groups based on their shared perceptions of belonging and social connection - groups we call attitudinal communities. Some lurkers feel very connected to their class; others do not. Importantly, you cannot predict which group a student belongs to just by watching whether they post. We also found that these feelings of connection change differently for different students over the course of a semester, regardless of whether they post or just read. The takeaway: treating all non-posting students as disengaged oversimplifies a much richer picture of how people experience online learning.
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Why is it important?
Learning analytics — the tools educators and researchers use to understand student engagement — almost exclusively rely on behavioral data: who posted, how many times, how many threads were viewed. This study challenges that foundation. We show that students who look identical in activity logs can have fundamentally different experiences of belonging and social connection in their course. This matters for three reasons. First, it means that interventions targeting "lurkers" based purely on posting behavior risk misidentifying who actually needs support. Second, it introduces attitudinal communities as a new, validated analytical construct that captures structured variation in learner experience that behavioral data simply cannot see. Third, the temporal findings reveal that students' sense of connection evolves in heterogeneous ways across a semester - meaning one-time snapshots miss the dynamics of how engagement experiences develop. As online and hybrid education continues to scale globally, this work provides a more complete and humane framework for understanding participation - one that accounts for what students feel, not just what they do.
Perspectives
This paper means a great deal to me personally. As someone who came into academia through a non-traditional path; balancing real-world work experience with graduate study I have sat in online courses and felt exactly what this research describes. There were times I read every single discussion thread, thought carefully about the material, felt genuinely connected to what was being discussed, and still never posted a word. By every standard metric, I would have been labeled a lurker. But I was not disengaged. I was learning, reflecting, and participating in my own way. That personal experience is part of what drew me to this question in the first place. I wanted to give data and language to something that many online learners feel but that the field had not yet fully captured. That silence is not the same as absence, and that belonging does not require a post count. I am proud that this work was conducted at scale, with real students in real courses, and that the findings hold up statistically. But more than the numbers, I hope this paper encourages instructors, designers, and fellow researchers to pause before assuming they understand a student's experience just by looking at their activity log. The students who never post are not a problem to be fixed, they are a diverse, complex group of people whose inner experience of the classroom deserves to be understood on its own terms.
Marjorie Ivy
Georgia Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Beyond Lurking: Attitudinal Communities and Engagement Trajectories in Online Courses, June 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3774398.3811599.
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