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.
Magna Publications © 2023 All rights reserved
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.
Many instructors find themselves at a loss as to how to encourage meaningful conversations. While there are numerous suggestions for discussion activities in articles, in conference papers, online, and elsewhere, most treat all students the same. But students differ in how they participate in discussion, and thus improving online discussion requires understanding and addressing the issues each individual student faces. Happily, most student participation can be fit into categories, or archetypes, that instructors can use to provide the interventions that will help each student. Using the work of Salmon (2013) as a guide, I started applying the archetype framework below to students in my own courses.
While there are many possible ways to “use” these archetypes, I have found particular success with two general approaches that can be implemented either alone or separately.
The first is instructor centered. As a semester progresses, these archetypes enable me to identify the best ways to encourage students’ participation on the discussion board, using their own patterns of behavior as a guide. So, while I of course reflect frequently on the quality of the prompts I’m providing (I am a big fan of “be curious, not furious”), these archetypes serve as helpful reminders that not every student comes to the discussion board in the same way. That said, what works for one creature often works for all of them. For example, it is likely that it’s not only the fox who will need assistance with citing sources or the squirrel who will need to learn how to adjust their LMS notifications. In other words—and to carry the animal theme further—when it comes to discussion boards, what’s good for the goose is often good for the gander.
Here are a few of the species-specific interventions I have found most useful:
The second approach is student centered. At the beginning of a semester, I provide the descriptions of each animal and ask students to identify which one they believe themselves to be—a twist on the oft-used “If you were an animal, which would you want to be?” icebreaker. They share this information with me privately in a separate assignment (such as a journal entry), along with strategies they have enjoyed or found helpful in their previous experiences with discussion boards—which is where many of the intervention strategies above originated. This approach not only allows students to practice a bit of self-reflection and metacognition in terms of how they could improve their participation but also enables me to assign students to groups (either mixed or homogenous) for activities beyond the discussion board. As a side note, I have found that the animal archetypes often have the unintended (but highly positive) consequence of creating a sense of identity and belonging in the online environment. In fact, it’s not uncommon for comments like “Well, you know, as an otter, I like to . . .” or “I know I’m not really a wolf, but . . .” to pop up. Using animal archetypes to diagnose patterns of participation and applying interventions tailored to each student can go a long way in making discussion board a more enjoyable experience for everyone.
Salmon, G. (2013). E-tivities: The key to active online learning (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Karrin Lukacs, PhD, is the director of Transformative Teaching and Learning and a professor of curriculum and instruction at Shenandoah University.
