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Managing Discussion Boards

Why?

• Carefully planning the types of frequencies of responses may allow you more time to attend to other course activities.
• Planning diverse response strategies allows variety on the discussion board.
• Attention to managing the discussion board allows you to develop a schedule and routine for posting the board.

Implications for Teaching and Learning.

• Posting to the discussion board can take a great deal of time unless some management strategy is implemented.
• Planning the types of responses you intend to use in the discussion area allows you to schedule time for different types of responses.
• Clearly telling students the types of responses to expect reduces uncertainty in the course.
• Planning allows you to insert general forums to handle routine questions where you can respond once and all students can read.

Promising Practices for TWU.

• Plan different types of responses for the discussion board based on your learning outcomes for that board.
• Communicate the types of responses students will see on the board.
• Develop some regular schedule to read, respond, and grade forums.
• Develop a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) forum on the board to handle many of the technical or logistical questions.
• Communicate your expectations for the type and quality of postings.
• Directly teach the discussion board.
• Learn how to use the search feature and the collection feature.
• Clearly define your availability on the board by letting students know when you will respond to the board, when you will look in on the board, and when you will be absent from the board.
• Share grading policies and rubrics.

As an instructor, three main functions must be mastered for managing the discussion board: 1.) Reading postings, 2.) Replying to postings, and 3.) Grading postings. This, in no way, means that you must do all three of these functions for every forum. It does mean that learning some ways to organize the board may help you accomplish these tasks.

Reading Posts.

How you structure the reading of posts in a forum has much to do with your intentions for the forum. If your requirement for discussion grades deals with some measure of quality for the initial post and some requirement for replies to other postings, you can save considerable time by allowing the Grade Forum function to organize the postings for you. Click on the Grade Forum function in the toolbar and you will see all postings organized by student (in alphabetical order). This allows you to grade and read at the same time and does not require you to search for postings.

The Search feature allows you to search for postings by a particular student. This is a quick way to read all postings for a particular student and is very useful if you have no intention of grading the forum. You can use this function to search within a certain forum or to search the entire discussion board. 

There is no requirement to read posts in a linear manner if students understand the function of a thread. You can read the postings in any order since a proper forum will contain threads with all associated replies.

Replying to Posts.

We encourage you to plan the type of response required by you from forum to forum. Your participation in the forums is important for learning but that doesn't mean that you must respond individually to each student in each forum. Let your students know to expect individual replies for certain forums and summaries for other forums. Not only will this decrease your workload, but it will provide some variety to the forums.

Again, your strategy is dependent upon your outcomes for the forum. If your intent is to respond individually to initial postings, we suggest you use the Grade Forum feature to organize the posts. One way to expedite this is to use this feature to collect and read the posts while you develop your responses on a word processor (record the student name so you place the correct response with the correct student). Move to the forum and scan the threads for each student. Open the thread and paste a copy of your response as a reply. You can also use this technique to use the search feature to search a particular forum. 

Grading Posts.

The discussion grader is now incorporated into the discussion board. You must enable grading (by forum or by thread, dependent upon your intended outcomes). This grading function provides the ability to read and grade from a single location. If your intent is to read and assign a grade, this is the tool to use. One suggestion is to use this tool for reading and grading and then to return to the forum to post a general summary of the threads in the forum.

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