| Tip
&
Trick
4
|
Tip
# 4 – Use the discussion board to promote effective
communication and teach critical thinking and collaboration
skills
In the experience of this author, faculty
members who are technologically skilled, yet complain that
online teaching is ineffective or burdensome, have not developed
skills for utilizing the discussion board effectively.
While not all techniques work for every instructor and every
subject, the lessons of most happy online faculty can be
summarized as:
- Organization is everything
- Offer instructions
- Carefully enforce them
- Think about pathways and threads
(see trick 4 below)
- Offer
assignments that promote:
- Critical thinking
- Have relevant application for
your students
- Provide for Interaction between
students
- Allow
for student’s individual expression of their
own ideas (avoids copy/paste plagiarism)
- A
"real" audience for student work
- Be prepared to spend extra time during
the first three weeks/modules of the course. And,
give students more responsibility slowly, over time.
Trick # 4 –
Topics and Threads
Instructors often
write test questions that ask students to regurgitate information.
If your goal is memorization, ask the question in a test
setting, not on the discussion board. Most community
college faculty recognize that memorization is a basic skill
(remember Bloom's Taxonomy). Adult learners need to
use information, and online courses allow them the opportunity
to reflect on their learning and discuss it in writing.
Write questions
that get students involved in the subject. Use the discussion
board to create a "real audience" for the students'
work, making their efforts seem more valuable. Let
them teach each other. Guide their writing, but require
comments on other students' work. A well facilitated
discussion board will be labor intensive in the first portion
of the class, but by the end of the course, students should
be interacting and assuming greater responsibility for "teaching"
each other.
Topics:
Topics
on a discussion board are those items used as categories
for the conversation. In the example illustrated below,
from a WebCT course, the topics are divided for several
purposes. For example, there is a "main"
topic where one might post general comments. There
are topics for "legal teams," which were used
in this course as asynchronous discussion options for teams
of students working on a project. There are topics
by lesson, where the actual conversations about the assignments
are posted. Finally, there are places to ask questions:
"Questions for the Prof." In the past these
questions were buried in the topic with the lesson conversations,
and the instructor had to read through that section regularly
to find questions and answer them in a timely fashion.
By dividing the topics, the instructor now logs on regularly
(recommend 3-4 times per week) and looks just at the questions,
knowing that they can address lesson materials after all
of them are posted (note: it is a best practice to review
the lesson responses more often in the first two or three
weeks of class as students may need guidance more often).
Threads: Threads refer
to the flow of the conversation. As you will see below,
comments to the main question are 'out dented' to the right
column under the question. Comments made to the work
of other students are indented under the comments of a previous
student. This enables the instructor to see who is
commenting on whose work.
Go
to Tip #5 
|
