When we think of online courses, many of us immediately think of the ubiquitous discussion board. There is good reason for the popularity of discussion boards in online classes. They provide students with the opportunity to actively work through course material as they build a collaborative learning community. They are also one of the most intuitive and easy tools for faculty to learn to use in a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Blackboard.
However, discussion boards are also one of the most controversial elements of online learning, inspiring loathing in some students (and teachers). If they are not designed and managed well, discussion boards can feel like busy work that students complete for points and then forget about. They can feel forced and artificial if they are not linked to other assignments.
As you might expect, this problem has been discussed numerous times by many experts. In this post, I will share a few strategies for increasing the learning and enjoyment that your discussion boards can bring to a class…without you having to spend all your time in the discussion board.
First, it helps to know what discussion boards are useful for. Discussion boards should be used in a purposeful way that contributes to the goals and outcomes of your course. Too often, we think that online courses have to follow a particular format or have to include particular components, even if that doesn't’t suit our course and students. Instead, I think that we should be guided by our student learning outcomes (our goals for our students) and by our students’ needs. Discussion boards are not the best substitute for classroom discussion (a Collaborate Ultra session does a better job of simulating the classroom). Instead, they enable some types of learning experiences that are difficult to create in the face-to-face classroom.
As one researcher wrote, the distance created by asynchronous discussion boards, in which students write and read one another’s work at different times, can cultivate the skill of receptive listening to diverse perspectives about hot-button issues. Whereas in a face-to-face classroom students with unpopular views can sometimes sit silently once they realize their viewpoint is not shared by the most vocal students in the class, in discussion boards all students can be required to share their viewpoints, sometimes before reading what others have written. Imagine a classroom discussion about a controversial topic that pushes students’ buttons and sometimes shuts down meaningful and fruitful discussion in your class. Forcing students to slow down and think through their response to that topic, guided by challenging (perhaps multi-part) questions from you, can encourage greater reflection and consideration of their starting assumptions. The time and space for reflecting on our knee-jerk reactions can foster greater intellectual and ethical maturity in students. If developing those qualities is important to you as a teacher, then discussion boards (whether you are teaching online or on campus) can be an extremely powerful tool for your teaching.
Second, the structure matters a great deal. I would encourage you to set up discussion board forums so that each question is a thread (started by you as the instructor, when you post the question for the thread) and that student responses all occur within that pre-existing thread. In my own online courses, I do not allow students to create their own threads but instead require them to contribute to the threaded discussion of a particular question along with their peers. Reading everybody’s responses to a particular question on one page encourages more interactive conversation than if each students’ set of answers is housed under a separate thread.
Here are my instructions to my students (feel free to adapt them if you find them useful): I have posted several questions here, each with its own thread. If you are adding to or responding to an existing conversation about a question (ie. to my posting of the question), please respond to my original post about the question and add to that thread. Please do not create a new thread about that question. That way our topics will be bundled together into conversations in the forum, creating more of a back-and-forth real discussion within our course.
You can disallow students from creating new threads by unchecking that box in the Forum Settings when you create a new discussion board forum.
Third, the grading strategies and feedback we provide to students effect their perception of the assignment. When we create discussion board forums in our classes, we want to grade them so that students will be motivated to participate and complete this assignment. Some forms of grading, such as requiring a mandatory number of responses to classmates’ posts (which I admit to having done in the past), can lead students to complete the minimum requirement and perceive the discussion board as busywork, a hoop to jump through. At the same time, research has shown that grading and providing feedback on discussion board participation is effective in promoting and encouraging meaningful discussion if students are provided with an explanation of expectations the rubric used to grade their participation before completing the assignment, and are given timely feedback so they can apply it to the next forum.
Grading discussion boards has one other obvious drawback: the amount of reading and grading for the teacher can quickly feel overwhelming. How can we provide meaningful and helpful feedback to help students improve, and establish our ‘presence’ in an online course, without sitting bleary-eyed in front of our computer 10 hours a day?
One strategy is to provide most of your feedback through a well-designed grading rubric, limiting your comments on discussion board contributions, and to offer collective feedback summarizing your observations and comments in a weekly announcement. With a limited time commitment for each week’s discussion board forum, schedule your grading session early in the week (say, Monday or Tuesday if the forum closes on Sunday) and get students a grade and feedback as early as possible, making clear how they can improve in that week’s forum.
There are many other strategies and a lot of advice about how to design and facilitate effective discussion boards.
Online Learning Insights published a useful three-part series on the topic, including grading rubrics, written by Debbie Morrison: https://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/how-to-get-students-to-participate-in-online-discussions/
Victoria Nesbick has created a one-page list of strategies, which she has shared with us.
