Using Online Discussion Boards
If you’ve ever taken an online course, especially one that will earn you a grade, you are undoubtedly familiar with online discussion boards. You know the uniquely awkward torture of online discussion board groups in which you try to post a meaningful response to the instructor’s question and then find the posts of two classmates to comment on. It’s likely you have little more to say than “Yes, I agree,” because you don’t want to be that classmate, but somehow you draw out whatever you could have said in a single sentence into enough to meet the teacher’s minimum requirements. If you like to get your assignments done early, it’s even worse: most students wait until the very last minute to post, so you don’t have a lot to choose from, and odds are, you’re not invested enough in the conversation to return to it. You’ve earned your points. As more schools adopt learning management systems with discussion board features, it’s easy to ignore them altogether or fall into the trap of creating the same frustrating “busy work” assignments we so dislike when we’re students if we don’t take the time to think about how to utilize them in a way that is truly meaningful for students.
For many years, our AP English Literature and Composition course was primarily classroom discussion-based. On a recent episode of our Answers May Vary podcast, we share the strategies we use to make the most of in-person classroom discussions. We thought it would also be helpful to share with you the strategies we implemented with online discussion boards and online discussion groups in order to find success that (spoiler alert) we believe facilitated the most authentic learning for the largest number of students in our nearly 15 years of teaching AP Literature. How did we arrive at using online discussion boards, you ask? You can probably already guess. The pandemic, of course! We started with large discussions on Zoom, essentially trying to replicate what we did in person online. It got us to the end of the 2019-2020 school year, but we knew all along that it just wasn’t working. It was stressful trying to run the discussion, provide verbal feedback, monitor and respond to the chat, and track everyone’s participation. When it became clear we would be starting, if not spending the entirety of, the 2020-2021 school year virtually, we knew we had to find another way. In August 2020 (no time like the last minute to push out something entirely new), our school district encouraged us to use the Canvas Learning Management System. It provided robust discussion board and discussion group features, so we decided to figure out how to use them to take the place of our in-person class discussions.
Initially, it didn’t go well: we posted questions and asked students to post a response and comment on two peers’ posts, doing the very same thing we couldn’t stand as students, but hey, it was very last minute (thanks a lot, school district) and a global pandemic (thanks a lot, COVID-19). While students did engage with this, and some made insightful comments in their initial posts, it wasn’t a discussion. It was obvious that few students read the posts that had come before, so they often repeated each other, rehashing the same ideas rather than building on the previous comments and adding to the development of ideas for the class as a whole. In commenting on peers’ posts, students found two, usually ones they agreed with, and posted meaningless compliments that did nothing to move the conversation forward or generate any sort of meaningful interaction. Unsurprisingly, the first post always got a comment from everyone, while later (and often better) posts dwindled into obscurity. Sure, students were doing what was asked of them, but this was hardly the meaningful experience we needed to replace in-person discussions.
We tried a variety of different tactics: assigning certain students to comment on certain questions, giving different deadlines for initial posts and comments on others’ posts, and providing sentence structures for giving meaningful feedback to peers. While some of these things helped, what really made the difference for us and turned online discussion boards and discussion board groups, specifically, into a powerful tool for learning was when we started putting students in groups and assigning them to complete a unique and specific task.
Because we were determined to make students engage throughout the entirety of the process, we created a structured flow for the assignment with multiple mini-deadlines. Students had to contribute an initial product (theme statement, piece of supporting evidence, example of a literary device, etc.) by a certain time and date. Everyone in the group had to comment on these initial posts, and then they needed to come to some sort of consensus. Since they would all share the final grade for the final product, and there needed to be evidence of what led to the creation of it on the discussion board itself, there was an incentive to engage in some back-and-forth to determine whether or not these initial products were correct. Once students had settled on these pieces, they had to work together to draft a paragraph supporting a theme or purpose statement for the text or passage, voting on versions they preferred, disagreeing with inaccurate statements, and suggesting additions and revisions to make their meaning more clear. By the final deadline, students submitted a final written product, and they received a group grade for that product as well as an individual grade for the quality of their participation throughout the discussion.
While there were certainly bumps along the way, and we found our directions became increasingly specific in response to problems and issues that arose with our particular students, we were pleasantly surprised by the results of these structured discussions. Even when the final product was not as good as we hoped it would be or didn’t develop to the potential the group seemed to have earlier in the week, it was obvious that larger numbers of students engaged in the process and really grappled with texts in ways far more meaningful and significant than they ever could have in an in-person whole class discussion. Because there was a goal to the discussion and specific outcomes which needed to be achieved as part of both the individual and group portion of the grade students earned, students had incentives to disagree, debate, and work together to determine the meaning of a text.
As teachers, we were enabled to be far more engaged with each group than a more traditional approach allows. Instead of running the discussion from the front of the room, we were able to monitor multiple discussions, provide encouragement and gentle redirection where it was needed, and truly get a sense of each student’s ability to grapple with the text and engage meaningfully with their peers. Sometimes, a whole group would jump on a Zoom call to help work out a point of confusion, we could urge a quiet student to be more forceful about his or her accurate point, or we could question an inaccurate statement that had been blindly accepted by many in the group. And we were able to provide writing feedback that we never could have provided in other circumstances: nearly every other week, students produced a piece of writing, but because they composed as a group, we only had to read five or six. We recorded screencasts walking through the paragraph and provided detailed feedback. To motivate students to watch all five or six screencasts rather than just the one for their group, we included questions about those screencasts on the unit quizzes. More importantly, students who truly wanted to improve their writing had multiple opportunities to receive detailed feedback on the process of constructing literary arguments and also watch/listen to teachers walk through the thought process that accompanies scoring student responses.
Because we made it clear to students that they only earned credit for discussion that took place in their online discussion board groups and made its way to the online discussion board, students were discouraged from “working things out” in group chats, Google Meets or Hangouts, on a separate Google Doc, etc. This enabled us to keep a close eye on group dynamics, and it influenced the way we structured our groups as the semester and year progressed. Initially, we divided students randomly. However, as both the students and we settled into a rhythm and cadence with online discussion boards and navigating online discussion board groups, it became obvious which students were bulldozers, which students excelled at organizing or facilitating, which students were great at collaboration, which students were frequent but unhelpful participants, and which students never participated or contributed to the discussion. We started intentionally creating groups to combat negative issues and facilitate situations that would allow students to grow in either their understanding or their personal development. Students who tended to bulldoze the conversation got split up, and students who were willing to speak up when they saw problems were placed with some of the more difficult students. Students who had a particularly bad experience got placed in a more functional group the next time. If a group worked particularly well together, we kept them together with a more challenging text to see what they could do with it. For first semester we kept non-participants in the mix with active participants, but in second semester, we explained that the free ride was over. Students who didn’t participate all got grouped together so that they would have to step up and participate. Sometimes it worked, and those now frustrated students “graduated” back to the regular groups. Those students who truly refused to participate were no longer inconveniencing their peers.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly knowing human nature, a large part of the work we did was in teaching students how to work in groups: we had a student who was consistently and “loudly” wrong, but few students were willing to challenge him. We worked to teach students that they need to learn to correct each other kindly. We spent a lot of time encouraging students with less confidence to stand up for their ideas. We taught students how to navigate awkward group dynamics. It’s hard to address these issues in class: you can’t be present in every group, you’re privy to very little student conversation, and most students stop talking about the content when you show up on their radar (or rely too heavily on you to sort out disagreements). Because everyone had to post and the posts were visible to the entire group, we could track these dynamics in a unique way. If your students are anything like ours, they often wonder (and sometimes complain), “When will I ever use this in real life?” Luckily, in implementing this style of class discussion we could share numerous real-life examples: not only is it preparing students for online discussion boards in the classes they will take digitally in college, but it also reflects a shift to a more collaborative and communal work environment that is becoming increasingly more digitally based in a post-pandemic world.
Ultimately, these structured online discussion board groups and assignments ended up being far more meaningful and productive than our previous in-class discussions. Yes, there is a learning curve on this for you as the teacher and for your students as participants. Yes, many students found them frustrating, and there were times we were frustrated too, but we wholeheartedly believe this group of students grew significantly as readers, writers, and communicators, far more so than in any other year. A key takeaway for us was that online discussion boards can be a meaningful tool, but as we learned quickly, to get the most benefit out of them for yourself as part of your course structure, but more importantly for the students you are attempting to engage in the sometimes painful process of truly learning, they need to be both structured and a regular part of your classroom routine.
What has your experience with online discussion boards been? Have you ever tried online discussion board groups? What frustrations have you experienced with this approach to learning? What strategies have you come up with to make them work for you and your students? Reach out to us at [email protected] or DM us @threeheads.works. We invested a lot of time and effort into this process and feel passionate about the results we got, so we’d love to keep the conversation going if you’re interested!