Discussion Forums

Discussion Forums in Discovery

Best Practices

Courtesy: Chuck Gobin

• In classes larger than 10, use the Groups feature to subdivide the class. You will have better discussions in groups of 5-6 students than in a “herd” of 20. You can always shuffle who is in a group as the semester progresses, if you need to, and you will be able to see and participate in all the groups. Students will only see comments from others in their group.
• Directed discussion prompts work better than “say something interesting” prompts. The prompt could either push the students deeper into a reading assignment (“Frederick Douglass makes the point that many slaves would ‘rather bear those ills we had, than fly to others, that we knew not of.’ How does this help explain why so few slaves escaped?”) or raise a conceptual question (“What do you see as the pros and cons of an apprenticeship model of education?”)
• Students crave instructor participation in forums, or some evidence that they’ve been heard. While it is impractical to reply to every individual post, instructors should look for ways to signal to a group or a class that they have read their posts. This may be in the form of a global comment made to the group or class as a whole (I noticed that several of you mentioned “X.” That’s great, but what about “Y”?)
• For grading purposes, and so that students can feel they’ve completed something, create separate discussions for each topic, rather than one long discussion forum containing all the threads for the whole semester. This also gives you the ability to “turn off” a discussion forum on a certain date if you don’t want late, straggling entries.
• Decide in advance why you want the discussion forum. If it is a low-stakes thought generator, then what is important is participation. So, for grading purposes, an on-time post that takes the assignment seriously (not just a one-sentence, “It was interesting, I agree,” response) gets full credit. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to grade everything qualitatively. You can make other discussions more important. And, of course, you don’t have to tell the students that some discussions may be more important than others. The main thing is to plan for what you can keep up with.
• Discussions can also be spaces for group brainstorming, planning, and project work.