Advances in technology reinforce the imperative to obtain further insight into the factors that impact online interaction in online environments. Even though past researchers have extracted factors impacting student online interaction and engagement, there is a lack of research that uncovers the dynamics of these relationships and investigates the impact of a comprehensive set of factors on student online interaction at the same time. Thus, this paper seeks to fill this gap by employing a causal loop approach to uncover the interrelationships of these factors that contribute to a positive impact on students’ learning outcomes, and to evaluate satisfaction and engagement in online courses by focussing on students’ online interaction. To this end, a rich qualitative data set was obtained from an online focus group consisting of students from a large online course, and a thematic analysis was conducted resulting in identifying different factors that played a role in the topic under study. More importantly, causal loop modelling was used to model these factors and their causal interrelationships.

中文翻译：

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因果循环法揭示学生在线互动和参与的相互关系及其影响因素

技术的进步加强了对影响在线环境中在线互动的因素的深入了解的必要性。尽管过去的研究人员已经提取了影响学生在线互动和互动的因素，但仍然缺乏研究揭示这些关系的动态并同时调查一系列综合因素对学生在线互动的影响。因此，本文试图通过采用因果循环方法来填补这些空白，以发现这些因素对学生的学习成果产生积极影响的相互关系，并通过关注学生的在线互动来评估在线课程的满意度和参与度。为此，从包括大型在线课程的学生在内的在线焦点小组获得了丰富的定性数据集，并且进行了主题分析，从而确定了在所研究主题中起作用的不同因素。更重要的是，使用因果循环建模来对这些因素及其因果相互关系进行建模。