Discussion Boards Online Courses

[reverist]

If, for example, the discussion is supposed to happen over a week, you need to require that students' initial posts are due early in the week. Otherwise you'll get a lot of last minute, meaningless responses at the very end of the week.

I set deadlines for graded online discussions as:

• First post must be by Wednesday midnight.
• Second post by Friday midnight.
• Third post by Sunday midnight, which is when the week's discussion ends.

This. I try to prep my students by telling them something like "You're having a discussion with someone, not talking at them and running away. Try to view it like a real-world discussion. Add something substantive. Ask an insightful question. Connect this with another point. In replies, don't just repeat your initial post [had this happen quite a few times]."

I have also done it both ways with respect to word counts. Unfortunately it wasn't a truly good test since one was a gen ed course and the other a junior-level elective, but I did get significantly better results using a word count. Only occasionally do I feel students have "blah-blah-ed" their way into meeting the standard. In the gen ed course, where no word count is listed, it seems my students take that to indicate writing two or three sentences along the lines of "I totally agree. It is hard to know the right answer to x. I did enjoy the reading, though. Good job!" is good enough.

I have found some of the best discussions have come as I have made my students leaders. Once they've all signed up for the course (late adds and drops make this a bit tricky, but hang on), I divide them into groups. Each forum is run by a group. By the second day of the week, each group member makes an initial post. It is the job of everyone else not in said group to reply to two initial posts, by the fourth day. It is the job of each group member to reply to every reply. Basically, instead of getting mile-wide, inch-deep "discussions" where you have a post and a reply, we get post-reply-post-reply, sometimes more. The students mostly have taken it seriously, especially when it is their week. On the occasions where someone doesn't do it, they fail the assignment (but I've always had enough in the rest of the group do it).

[HigherEd7]

If you have students post an initial response by Wed and one or two more by the end of the week, how is this going to enhance student learning if a student does not take the time to read a response to his post on a Sunday before the due date? It seems like busy work. Thoughts?

[Hegemony]

I don't understand that question.  I'll say that I strongly encourage students to go back and read the whole discussion (not just the parts they participated in) at the end.

[HigherEd7]

I don't understand that question.  I'll say that I strongly encourage students to go back and read the whole discussion (not just the parts they participated in) at the end.

From my experience at least at the undergraduate level most students do not go back and read someones response or post, and it just seems like busy work with no real way to determine if a student has learned anything, but a response or two.

[Hegemony]

Maybe the subject matter of the posts needs to be more entertaining and/or relevant.  On my discussion boards, the students frequently contribute insights and (verifiable) facts I didn't know, which tend to end up on quizzes.  And they are a lot of fun.  Students are required to make two responses, but a number of them make more (which don't earn a grade), so I can tell they are engaged.

[HigherEd7]

Maybe the subject matter of the posts needs to be more entertaining and/or relevant.  On my discussion boards, the students frequently contribute insights and (verifiable) facts I didn't know, which tend to end up on quizzes.  And they are a lot of fun.  Students are required to make two responses, but a number of them make more (which don't earn a grade), so I can tell they are engaged.

Great point, I am going to try that this semester. I have gotten away from them referencing the textbook in their responses it turns into one reference after another one. Do you just use a standard rubric when you grade or are you really looking for certain things in their response. I normally use a 3-2-1 column rubric.

[Hegemony]

If the post adds something to the conversation and doesn't make any egregious errors, I give it full points (4 points). Most of them get 4 points. If it's weak or has a mistake, I point out the mistake gently, either in the discussion itself or on SpeedGrader, and deduct points. If people are not really making an effort, they might not get any points. But 99% of the time they make a good effort. I don't take a long time to grade them. Since I've read the whole discussion several times in the course of the week, and made extensive comments of my own, I recognize the posts when it comes time to grade them, and I just slap a number on them quickly, sometimes with a brief comment in the SpeedGrader ("I love the idea of that!" or "But what about the dog??", etc.)

[MarathonRunner]

When I was an undergrad I had one online course where we had to make online discussion posts in small groups, but because these discussions were only worth a small percentage of the final grade I was the only student who made them in my group. Since we received marks for both posting ourselves and contributing to others' posts, the professor had to change the marking scheme since I had no one else to reply to! So as an instructor I make sure to carefully craft any online discussion assignments so that other students don't run into the same problem. Making them worth a more substantive percentage of the final grade is one way to do it, but there are other approaches that can be used.