Why Keep Silent Online? Voices from Stay-at-home Postgraduate Students

Abstract

Online classroom silence is an overlooked site of research irrespective of the growing popularity of online teaching in today’s education. Against this background, this study showcases why a group of postgraduate students keep silent in their online classes through classroom observation, stimulated recall interviews and in-depth interviews. Reasons found are classified into three categories: the peculiarity of online class, the uniqueness of postgraduate academic lesson, and other general reasons resembling the ones in the traditional classroom. In addition, these factors are found to be interconnected and sometimes exerting both positive and negative effects; unexpectedly, the factor of ‘losing face’, contrary to previous studies, is trivial in contributing to postgraduate students’ online-classroom silence.