In an online course, discussion boards provide a visible, interactive space for students to interact with their peers and their instructor. Asynchronous, online discussions where students can process the material, interact with each other, and form a collaborative community are key to successful online teaching. The instructor will need to craft discussion prompts, activities, and/or formats that are purposeful, interactive, and that students recognize as meaningful learning experiences.
Setting Up an Effective Discussion
There are many great ways to organize a discussion board, and you can mix and match according to the student learning goals. Here are a few possibilities to get you started.
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
After students review asynchronous content and/or attend a synchronous class session, a quick Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) can provide both students and instructor with information about how learning is happening.
Here are two examples of CATs from the Vanderbilt CFT teaching guide on the topic:
- The Minute Paper tests how students are gaining knowledge, or not. The instructor ends class by asking students to write a brief response to the following questions: “What was the most important thing you learned during this class?” and “What important question remains unanswered?”
- The Muddiest Point is one of the simplest CATs to help assess where students are having difficulties. The technique consists of asking students to jot down a quick response to one question: “What was the muddiest point in [the lecture, discussion, homework assignment, film, etc.]?” The term “muddiest” means “most unclear” or “most confusing.”
These two types of CATs could be easily deployed on a discussion board as a quick way to check in with students and ensure that they are processing what they are learning. Questions that students post about the content can then be answered by the instructor using text or video, or a reference to the course materials where that answer can be found. Students can even chime in and help to answer each other’s questions!
Collaborative Note Taking
Asking students to share their class notes or use a collaborative document to create a thorough notes collection is a practice that has two main benefits. First, for students who have holes in their notes or need to review certain concepts in more depth, collaborative note taking provides a central location for that sort of review. Importantly, it keeps the notes in full view of the instructor who can also keep track of discussion and look out for misunderstandings or missing information. The second main benefit is accessibility. Some students may face obstacles in note taking. The Student Access Office may even assign that student a designated note taker to facilitate note sharing. When faculty include collaborative note taking in the discussion boards, that barrier to student access is removed completely making the course more accessible to all.
This collaborative note-taking practice might be useful in thinking through what a collaborative note taking discussion board might look like.
Instructor Prompt and Student Response
This may be the sort of discussion board most people consider when they think of online teaching. The instructor posts a follow up question, a problem, or an unresolved issue for students to respond to. The difficulty with this type of “prompt and response” format is that it can quickly get boring when more than a few students are contributing to the discussion. Riggs and Linder address this problem in their IDEA paper on the topic of active asynchronous online learning. Here is an excerpt from page 7 of that paper:
One of the most common question formats for online asynchronous discussions is for instructors to pose a question or brief list of questions, and then to ask students to first reply to the question(s) provided and then to return later to reply to the responses of two peers… Imagine a face-to-face course where the instructor poses one question, and then goes around the room and asks every individual student to reply to it. After just a few replies, there would be little of value left to add. Further imagine that the instructor went around the room again, asking each student to remark on two other students’ already-repetitive and tiresome answers.
No instructor wants to set up such a boring and repetitive experience for students. Here are a few tips for making prompts more meaningful and more useful for learning.
Draw on the initial discussion board posts for further learning activities
Faculty can give instructions for the original student post to be a substantial contribution and require that the second post synthesize, compare, or evaluate the original posts in some way other than just “respond to two classmates”. For example, in the first post, students may all post their approaches to solving a particularly complex problem. As a follow up, students may have to submit an assignment directly to the instructor where they choose 3 of their classmates’ potential solutions and describe the pros and cons of each approach. Another potential follow-up activity to the original post might be choosing one post that is significantly different from your own and asking 2-3 follow up questions to understand why that person made those choices. Or perhaps students can use the data from the initial posts to mock up a creative data visualization of how the class responded. That work can then shared on the discussion boards or turned in as a formative assessment.
An initial post of “line up and respond” can be much more useful for learning when the second post is more than just responding to the responses and is not the very same procedure every week. How can students use some or all of the data from the first round of responses to engage more deeply with the content? How can we ask students to do a variety of interesting activities with those initial responses? How can we get students to dig deeper, compare, contrast, synthesize, question, and extend based on the discussion board answers?
Form small discussion groups
Small groups help establish three conditions that enable the “respond to the prompt” type of discussions to thrive. First, deep, reflective, substantive conversations are effective when the parties involved know and trust each other. Forming consistent small groups for regular discussion allows group members to listen carefully to a handful of colleagues and, over time, develop a feeling of belonging in that group. Second, small groups limit the number of students lining up to respond to a prompt and to each other, meaning fewer responses are repetitive and there is more incentive to engage with each other. Finally, in a group of dozens of students, it is easy for any one student to just sit the discussion out. With so many posts, who will even notice one missing student? However, with small groups of four to six people everyone’s voice becomes essential to the conversation. Knowing that your words will matter creates motivation to engage.
Choose topics for discussion that are exciting or energizing
There are lots of topics that students love discussing online. All of social media is filled with people passionately discussing topics of interest in asynchronous online forums. You can choose discussion prompts that ask students to connect the course content to their own interests. You can bring in current events. You can bring in first person accounts for analysis. Discussion boards can be places where students discover how much fun it is to discuss academic concepts that have real world implications.
Student Portfolio or Multimedia Presentation Space
The discussion board is the one space built into the course management system where students can see and interact with each other’s work. Make the most of that possibility by creating a discussion topic where each student starts a thread that showcases their work during the semester. Fellow students can drop into each other’s spaces to offer feedback or encouragement or to get inspiration for their own work.
Even More Discussion Possibilities
Adapted from "Johnson, S.M. (2020). Discussion Boards. Vanderbilt University Course Development Resources." used under CC BY 4.0.