Discussions boards are one of the most commonly used tools to facilitate dialog in online courses. These boards allow for back and forth communications between students and instructors asynchronously over a period of time. Students are able to reflect upon their own ideas before sharing them with their classmates, leading to deeper discussions and learning. Additional benefits of integrating discussion boards into online courses include:
- Building a sense of learning community through sharing ideas,
- Provides students extra time to reflect on their ideas, research, and develop their responses before sharing their thoughts, and
- Help facilitate learning by allowing students to reflect and respond to the work of others.
The image below is a snapshot of an introductory "icebreaker" activity I had students participate in for a summer online version of the
MIS 1305 - Introduction to Information Technology and Processing course I teach occasionally.
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| Discussion board thread in the Canvas learning management system |
In my own instructional practice, discussion boards have played an important role in all fully online course that I have taught. Through varied structured designs, I rely on discussion boards to manage the text-heavy responses. As illustrated in the image above, Canvas discussion boards create an indented hierarchy of posting to show learners who replied to who and when. This visual queue makes following a discussion much more efficient for both students and me as the instructor. One added benefit to contemporary discussion boards is that students can embed other types of media (i.e. images, audio, and video recordings) into their postings besides text. This is a great enhancement to traditional discussion boards as students can communicate asynchronously in creative ways beyond text.
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