Instructors and students have a love-hate relationship with the online discussion board. On the one hand, it can foster dialogue and a sense of community. On the other, it can feel forced and flat.
As college instructors, we always encourage students to ask questions in class or during office hours. But many students with questions do not ask them in class for fear appearing stupid in front of others. They also may not have the time to come to
The textbook in the online educator preparation course I was redesigning would not have been my first choice. It was dry, theory heavy, and difficult to read. I wanted to supplement it with an engaging discussion activity—a student-directed one—that would motivate students to read it
Discussion is one of the biggest challenges for online students, and poor discussion is one of the biggest complaints among online faculty. Student responses are often perfunctory, lacking the depth the instructor desires. But rather than laziness, poor discussion often results from students not knowing
The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and
Online faculty often default to an essay assignment mindset when establishing the parameters for an online discussion. They require posts to be up to 500 words and to include several citations and other academic writing components, such as introductions, conclusions, and references.
Too often, asynchronous online discussions morph into students making only perfunctory postings to fulfill the bare minimum requirements. We blame students, but the deeper issue is that the discussion forum is foreign to students because real conversations aren’t planned. How often have you sat with
The LMS discussion forum was once the only real option for hosting discussion in an online course. But today there are a variety of options, from videoconferencing to social media to online post-it boards. The choices can leave faculty perplexed as to which to use.
One of the hallmarks of online learning is that students can engage in deeper discussion than they can in most face-to-face courses due to the additional think-time for crafting posts and responding to others. But many online instructors report disappointment in class discussions because students
Online teachers generally assume that student discussion and collaboration should occur in a learning management system’s (LMS’s) discussion forum. But for certain uses, online whiteboards work better than the LMS due to their fundamentally different design.
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