September 28, 2009

Hello Developers,

I hope you all had a good weekend - I think autumn has finally hit Minnesota! The wind is really blowing the leaves off the trees and it is starting to feel like apple crisp weather.

Today finds us at the 50% completion mark for winter 2010 developments. I will be going into your courses this week to check for your progress, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

I would like to spend some time today talking about discussion boards. It is a requirement at GU/MSB that every unit has a discussion board. The reason we do this is because it is important in the online environment that the students feel as though they are part of a community of learners. It has been proven to increase retention and student satisfaction.

As a whole I think we have done a great job of creating engaging and thought provoking discussion questions. However, I would like to challenge your discussion board writing just a bit further. I came across an article from the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) titled Developing Online Discussion Forums As Student Centered Peer E-Learning Environments. This article proposes the idea of student lead discussion boards. It is an article that I think is well worth the read!

The idea is that the traditional discussion boards involve an instructor proposing a question and then facilitating the responses. This article asks the question, “What if the students propose the discussion board questions and facilitate the responses?” In the traditional approach the responsibility is on the faculty member to be exclusively involved in the discussion question. If the students propose the discussion board questions and facilitate the responses the students will be taking a more active role in their learning process.

This is not to say that the instructor can’t be involved in the discussion (and definitely should be) but if it is the responsibility of the students to facilitate the discussion boards then the students need to become an advanced expert on a particular topic and can become engrossed in the learning environment on a whole different level.

I view this approach working particularly well in upper level courses (300 and 400 level) and encourage you to give it a try if you are developing an upper level course. Keep in mind that if you are concerned about giving this a try you could propose it as a group project or could add an additional discussion board to each unit using this format. Then there would be one traditional discussion board and one additional discussion board that is student led.

If you have experience in this type of discussion board facilitation please feel free to leave a comment and let us know how it went for you!

Have a great week!

Amy