Discussions
To build a successful online community, students need the tools to interact and have conversations. Through conversation, we learn about ourselves, each other, the topic, and how to work productively as a team. Though time and geography limit some of our conversations, the power of the connection using varied conversation technologies still builds community.
Students report that their satisfaction with online courses relates to instructor presence as well as the collaboration and sense of community they experience. In a successful online learning community, students support one another and help each other accomplish what they might not have on their own. When the students interact and direct their efforts toward a common goal, collaboration exists.
The discussion board facilitates asynchronous discourse among you and your students. The most common form of interaction in an online course is through discussions started by an instructor. Discussions are a good way to encourage students to think critically about the coursework and interact with each other's ideas. You can create discussions around individual course lessons or for your course in general. As the instructor, you own the discussions. After you start a discussion, you can post comments of your own to guide students.
Resources
It’s important to define terms related to online discussions in Blackboard.
Discussion Board: The general area in your course where asynchronous conversations happen. These conversations happen within individual Forums.
Forum: Where students discuss a topic or a group of related topics. This would typically be the initial post created by the instructor.
Thread: Includes the initial post in a forum and all replies to it. You can create forums and threads to organize discussions into units or topics relevant to your course.
Reply: Threads grow as users respond to the initial and subsequent posts. Replies build on one another to construct a conversation.
The resources below will help you start creating and managing your discussion forums.
Guide: Create a Discussion
Guide: Create a Thread
Guide: Post a Video Discussion
Guide: Writing a Post
Guide: Grading a Discussion
Developing Engaging Discussions
Watch (8min): Planning for an Online Discussion
Document: Why Students Don’t Participate in Discussions
Consider these best practices when setting up your forums.
Don’t just ask for basic facts, but set up a forum that allows for respectful disagreement and discussion. Early in the course, it may help for you to model this kind of dialogue, but be careful not to dominate the discussion. If you do, students will start writing to you rather than to each other. Student responses should always go beyond simple agreement and allow for an explanation of why they think a certain way.
Make sure you are creating forums based on shared course material or a piece of media that all students are able to access. Students should be making specific references to evidence in their posts.
Stagger the due dates of the posts. If an original student post is due one day, make the response post to other students two or three days later.
If you notice a student is not adequately participating, contact them to encourage more engagement with you and their classmates.
You and your students can use video in your posts using the Kaltura tools mentioned previously. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a camera rather than type out your thoughts.
Student Replies
If you decide to require students to reply to each other in a discussion forum, you may find that students struggle with thinking through and formulating responses that go past the typical ‘I agree’ post. This guide can be posted in your course to help students think about posts in different ways and develop well formulated responses.
