Digital storytelling in academic forums. A strategy for collaborative learning in distance higher education

The new digital age challenges teachers to restructure conventional asynchronous academic activities in distance higher education. In this regard, this paper focuses on the creation of digital narratives by students as a collaborative learning resource mediated by the online academic forum in an Ecuadorian university. The study presents a non-experimental ex-post-facto design and analyzes the student perspective according to study groups and gender of the participants by means of an ad hoc instrument. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to identify significant statistical differences between the variables of interest, and the degree of similarity between perceptions of narrative importance and construction skills by gender and group was assessed in general using non-metric multidimensional scaling. The results show that students were able to articulate a reflective and analytical narrative based on the evolution of the ideas of their peers in the academic forum, and positively valued the creation of the narrative with statistical differences according to the variables analyzed. This contribution reveals that digital narratives generated in the asynchronous forum are presented as new scenarios to motivate collaborative interaction among educational authors in distance studies.