Rationale for Using Discussion Forums (or google+ communities)

There are a host of benefits to online discussions, beyond the obvious community-building benefits already discussed. Quiet students who find it easy to avoid detection in a face-to-face classroom often enjoy participating in online discussions, because they can contribute at their own pace and have time to reflect on their contributions. Some of the more typical social and status constraints that influence face-to-face discussions are absent from asynchronous discussions. For example, issues of race, gender, accent, and status often do not come into play. Other more instructional benefits that have been identified by researchers include opportunities for constructing and negotiating meaning, promoting critical thinking, achieving higher levels of abstract cognitive processes, providing careful formal and reflective responses, and being motivated to write well due to the presence of a real audience and purpose for communicating.

The archival quality of text-based discussions also makes them attractive for accountability purposes, given that everything is documented in writing. Whether your discussions are a success will depend greatly on thoughtful consideration of a clearly defined use. In a broad sense, online discussions can be divided into three primary types according to use:

• Social forums can be used to promote social interaction and facilitate community building. These types of forums provide opportunities for learners to share personal experiences and to find common interests.
• Instructional forums centre on the subject matter goals and objectives of the course. They are used to support learning through various methods, such as collaboration, problem solving, and critical thinking.
• Collective knowledge forums provide opportunities to tap the expertise of class members. Examples might include “Tech-Help” forums and “Think Tanks,” in which classmates ask questions and receive assistance from their peers. This type of forum can be a valuable resource for the class and encourage a participatory culture, in which all members of the community are valued for their varied areas of expertise.

Of course, there are no hard-and-fast rules here. There can be some crossover among all three types of discussion forums. For example, discussions that employ the group’s collective knowledge for peer-assisted troubleshooting and other forms of technology assistance may fall into one of the other categories, depending on the instructional objectives of the class.

Preparing for Online Discussions

As with any online activity, it is important to spend some time thinking about where a discussion will be conducted and why a discussion is chosen as the instructional strategy versus another strategy.

Physical Structure of Discussion Forums

In the book Essential Elements: Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course , Elbaum, McIntrye, and Smith (2002) suggest that structuring your communications within the course site is a key element for success. Doing so will allow you to clearly delineate specific uses, provide for documentation, and facilitate easy retrieval of student questions and responses.

Often, the issue is not how discussions are facilitated but a lack of understanding about the purpose of discussion forums. Just because online discussions are text based does not mean they should be essay oriented. If we expect learners to engage with each other, with us, and with the content, we must provide them with something worth engaging about. This begins with the discussion prompt.

The topics addressed in instructional discussion forums should have instructional relevance. They should relate to, expand on, or otherwise support the content and objectives of the unit being studied. However, the question being posed should be one that can be discussed easily and that promotes interaction, interest, and curiosity from learners. In other words, discussion should be an integral part of course goals, not an add-on assignment (Fischer, Reiss, & Young, 2005).

Critical thinking is at the core of instruction and learning in any environment. Specific strategies can be employed in online discussions to sharpen the focus and dig deeper into learning. Again, the discussion prompts are critical:

Good questions are the key to productive discussions. These include not only the questions you use to jump-start discussions but also the questions you use to probe for deeper analysis, ask for clarification or examples, explore implications, etc. It is helpful to think about the various kinds of questions you might ask and the cognitive skills they require to answer.

When creating discussion prompts, consider including learners in the process by providing opportunities for them to take the lead in discussions, to suggest possible questions they would like to discuss on a topic, and to choose questions or prompts from a bank of questions you provide. If your curriculum provider gives prompts for you, take advantage of opportunities to extend thinking through your follow-up questioning strategies.

Strategies for Effective Discussion Board Facilitation

Effective facilitation involves a host of activities. The strategies discussed in the following list draw from an extensive knowledge base of what we know about effective discussion facilitation in face-to-face environments, the literature on discussion board facilitation for adult learners, and emerging literature on discussion board facilitation for K–12 learners (Collison et al., 2000; Elbaum et al., 2002; Rose & Smith, 2007):

• Identify the purpose of your discussion forum, and make students aware of it.
• Provide appropriate scaffolding, guidance, and resources for learners who are unfamiliar with text-based communications. Do not assume that learners come to your class knowing how to communicate effectively in instructional discussion forums. Model appropriate responses using questions to probe for deeper learning, offering descriptive comments, providing constructive
  criticism, posting early, checking in, asking thoughtful questions, responding respectfully, using personal experiences, and verifying appropriate grammar and spelling.
• Encourage peer participation, review, and feedback by establishing the expectation that learners are the central focus of the discussion. Instead of trying to respond to each student, post occasionally and thoughtfully.
• Establish this pattern early on, so that learners understand your intentions. (This applies to almost all cases except in the case of introductory activities where you should make a concerted effort to respond to each and every student.)
• Establish protocols that assure learners you are reading every post, even if you do not respond to every one. Do not just tell learners this. Show them through summarizing, highlighting selected posts, and providing frequent encouragement (not praise).
• Differentiate your role within discussions. Some will require extensive involvement, whereas others will require very little. Similarly, differentiate your voice and tone, depending on the purpose of the discussion.
• Avoid public praise of contributions. Instead, reflect student ideas and foster deep exploration of content by highlighting posts that are on the right track. Summarize two or three posts, and pose an additional question that challenges the learner to dig deeper.
• Improve the quality of the discussion by making available preparatory reading materials and preassignments, or ask learners to provide resources to support their points of view.
• Refrain from using discussion forums for self-reflection, questions that require right or wrong answers, essay or short-answer responses, and yes/no responses.
• Use discussion posts as a resource. Consider how you might use the extensive content created in discussion forums to provide further learning opportunities for students.

Managing Online Discussions

You have established a clear purpose for your discussion, created a thoughtful and engaging prompt, and employed effective strategies for facilitation. But what if you are still experiencing less than satisfactory results? No matter how well you prepare for online discussions, you will always face the possibility that you will not get the results you expected. Discussion forum management issues come in a variety of forms—from simple organizational concerns, such as time management, to more complex concerns that
surround student behavior.

Time Management Issues

One management issue that affects all of us is time. Every teacher feels the time crunch. Sometimes, it seems there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done. With careful planning, you may not be able to make more time, but you can make better use of the time that you do have:

• Set aside time for each communication activity each day. Create a schedule
  with blocks of time specifically set aside for responding to student discussions.
• Prepare posts in advance. Introductory posts and responses to icebreaker activities can usually be prepared well in advance and used over and over with small revisions.
• Save your past posts. Often, the same questions, issues, and conclusions occur repeatedly from term to term and class to class. Create a master course discussion document with your most frequent posts. They usually require only quick updates to make them current.
• Use students, parents, and other support mechanisms. Fear of inappropriate, dangerous, or life-threatening communications can hamper efforts to incorporate discussions into online classes. If you experience anxiety about your inability to monitor a large number of posts effectively, use other responsible individuals as moderators to alleviate your concerns