Learner-to-learner: Discussion Boards

The Discussion Board: extended

The importance of this tool being dependable, easy to use and well-designed cannot be overstated. This interface can serve as much more than a threaded listserv.  In many distance-ed environments this hub serves as the primary replacement for the “classroom experience.” This offers a text-based space for class interaction, and for breakouts of subgroups of students that may be or may not be moderated and/or observed by the instructor for limitless possible activities.

In the Quarterly review of Distance Education, Baglione and Natanski point out some serious advantages that these tools have to simple in-class discussion. “Including increased time for students to research and reflect on ideas and physical anonymity that may decrease inhibitions and foster broad participation.”[1]Joseph Levine states that the discussion board “presents unique opportunities for teaching in new ways. Building on a constructivist view of learning, it can stimulate an individualized form of learning at the higher levels of the cognitive domain.”[2]

Collaboration is important. Students may scaffold each other’s work, meaning that they provide a collection of information that allows students within a working group to find context for understanding from their peers as they learn.[3] It is also documented in study after study that the social dimension to student progress is critical. Students’ persistence in online learning is influenced more by what is referred to as the “social presence” than any other single factor.[4] The discussion interface, whether facebook-like or less contemporary serves as the center of many of these relationships. As Palloff and Pratt share at length in their book, “Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community,” working with other students, co-creating, is vital in online leaning and often underused in traditional class spaces.[5]

Discussion spaces should be useful and sophisticated tools to accommodate natural and intuitive interactions with groups varying in scope to accommodate the learning and communication goals. The traditional threaded discussion space was/is a web 1.0 tool offering little more than the “bulletin board” affordances of its real-world namesake.

Instead this should develop into a constructivist-inspired hub of interactions of several levels that are designed according to the needs and “menu choices” of a given instructor. This menu might include graphical layouts that allows readily observable discussion themes, dates of entry, and subgroup break down, and moderated and unmediated, real-time and a-synch scenarios. This menu of choices when combined with a selection of possible media formats (textual, audible, visual…) might be extensive but can be crafted in a fashion—like most good design—that is intuitive to the user, but subtle and sophisticated by the designer.

While distance ed is sometimes viewed as the bastard child of “real schooling,” or face-to-face instruction, studies have shown that the best variation for many classes is some of both worlds. The Department of Education’s meta-study of 20 years worth of scholarly research confirmed that distance ed techniques, especially when combined to traditional techniques, hybrid courses were the best possible variation on learning environment.[6] The study also points out extensive research regarding guided reflection as a great advantage to learners. This may be facilitated through these discussion centers. Finally the Journal of Online Teaching also conducted a meta-study that concluded that “distance education not only is comparable to traditional instruction, but also, subject to our criteria, can outperform traditional instruction.[7] Discussion interactions are no small part of the advantages that the distance or hybrid courses provides.

The other quite obvious advantage of discussion boards is that they allow a quantitative element to be added to what otherwise tends to be a largely subjective assessment. If students speak out in class or in groups this may be important but these contributions can become window dressing to the projects and exams on which a student is graded. Martin Andersen discusses ways to assess discussion board interaction at some length and states, “Given the importance of the discussion in the learning process at both the theoretical and empirical level, an appropriate measure of participation should be a component of each learner’s grade for the course.”[8] He continues and mentions a “wish list” for third parties, computer scientists,” to craft and supply tools for doing this automatically.

“…there is a need for collaborative efforts between computer scientists, educators and the providers of the technology for online education in order to develop data mining tools within the educational technology that can be used by the average user with minimal, or no, training. This relationship can also become symbiotic and dynamic in the sense that an initial assessment rubric can be developed with the current constraints of data mining in the asynchronous discussion forum context. In time, armed with a “wish-list” from those teaching in an asynchronous environment, computer scientists can develop more/better data mining tools to be implemented into the online teaching technology…“[9]

Adding a quantitative and, via reflection, qualitative fashion for assessing peer-to-peer and peer-to-instructor interactions with meaningful assessment strategies can indeed become part of the tech-enhanced tools designed to encourage communication and to help instructors reinforce these engagements

[1] Stephen L. Baglione and Michael Nastanski, “Superiority of Online Discussion: Faculty Perceptions,” Quarterly Review of Distance Education 8, no. 2 (2007): 139-150.

[2] S. Joseph Levine, “Online Discussion Board,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 113 (2007): 68.

[3] Barbara Means et al., “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies,” Government, U.S. Department of Education site, May 2009, 41, http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf.

[4] Wally Boston et al., “Exploration of the Relationship Between Indicators of the Community of Inquiry Framework and Retention in Online Programs,” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 13, no. 3 (October 2009): 76.

[5] Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt, Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community, 1st ed. (Jossey-Bass, 2004).

[6] Means et al., “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning,” 38.

[7] Mickey Shachar and Yoram Neumann, “Twenty Years of Research on the Academic Performance Differences Between Traditional and Distance Learning: Summative Meta-Analysis and Trend Examination,” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning 6, no. 2 (June 2010): xi, http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no2/shachar_0610.htm.

[8] Martin A. Andresen, “Discussion Forums: Success Factors, Outcomes, Assessments, and Limitations,” Educational Technology & Society 12, no. 1 (2009): 252.

[9] Ibid., 253.