The growth of online course management software like Blackboard is a potential godsend for the college composition classroom. Using discussion boards as a tool alongside more traditional, formal writing assignments allows your students to hone their writing skills in a familiar and casual environment.
To make online discussion forums an effective part of your composition pedagogy, you’ll need to determine beforehand what you want your students to get out of the exercise. Requiring your students to post to a discussion board without clear instructions and without regular feedback is likely to frustrate them more than it will help them. However, with careful planning, the discussion board can become an important aspect of prewriting and a productive extension of classroom discussions.
What do you want your students to learn?
As with any assignment, you’ll want to have clear learning goals associated with your discussion board activities. Do you just want your students to become accustomed to writing on a regular basis or do you want them to use the posts as preparation for a larger writing assignment? Is this primarily going to be an evaluative tool to ensure that students have read class materials or are you concerned with getting students to really think about the material?
In my experience, there are better tools for gauging whether or not students are reading assigned materials. At the end of the day, if you’re looking to police student reading behavior—and it is policing—then there’s no substitute for the good ol’ pop quiz. However, if you are interested in creating thoughtful engagement with material and in preparing students to participate in in-class discussions, then online posting can be a useful tool.
Of course, there will be some students who will post poorly though-out responses to half-read material; however, most students will rise to the occasion, particularly if you create an environment that allows students to receive direct peer feedback.
The best purposes to which discussion boards can be put are either to prep students for class discussions or to help them prepare for upcoming essays. It is possible to use the discussion board to achieve both goals, though it is highly unlikely that you’ll be able to address both aspects in a single week of posts.
In my teaching, I’ve found that directed student prompts work best when you’re using the discussion board format to prep students for a specific assignment. In contrast, more open prompts—accompanied by some general guidelines that encourage substantive engagement with course texts—work well for preparing students for in-class discussion.
Designing Discussion Prompts
A good discussion prompt can make the difference between a discussion board that simply creates extra work for you and your students and one that teaches your students important reading and writing skills while providing you with a new perspective on their ideas.
At the point that you’re sitting down to craft a prompt, you’ll already have a good idea of what you want to accomplish with the assignment. If you’re preparing students for a larger paper project, you may opt for formal or for more informal preparatory writing prompts.
Some examples of formal prompts include asking students to provide a rough outline of a paper or to write a draft of an introduction or a conclusion. While this type of work can be immediately transposed onto the final project, these prompts tend towards dryness and inevitably feel like “work” for students.
I find that more informal writing prompts can be a less intimidating way to get students to think through the rhetorical issues that will be central to their final paper. Here are a few examples of what these types of prompts might look like:
- Imagine that you are trying to “pitch” your paper to a publisher. Why should readers care about your essay? What real-world implications might it have? What are the “stakes” involved in your argument?
- Find a passage from the text that you think could provide support for your paper’s argument. Why do you think this passage supports your argument? What are alternate ways of interpreting this passage?
- What questions do you think readers will have once they’ve finished reading your essay? If you wrote a “sequel” to this essay, what would it be about?
Of course, even these more informal prompts are still highly directive. If you are primarily interested in getting students to intellectually engage with course texts, you may find it productive to give them more freedom in their responses. Of course, you’ll still want to lay down some ground rules. Does the student need to work with a specific passage or can he or she talk about the text as a whole? Does the text need to be directly quoted? Do you want summary or analysis? Do you want your students to make an argument or to pose a question?
Draft a clear statement of what you want—and don’t want—these posts to look like and give students a ballpark idea about appropriate post length. Basically, you’ll get what you ask for—so make sure students know what you want. If they have to guess, the experience—and the final product—will be frustrating for the both of you.
Developing a Feedback Plan
No one likes to talk to an empty room or a blank wall. However, that’s exactly what a mismanaged classroom discussion board can feel like. Ideally, you’ll want to create a situation in which students are receiving regular, substantive feedback on every post.
First, one strict rule: never ever try to respond individually to every student post. This will breed burnout on your part and will ultimately result in superficial and repetitive feedback for your students. One of the great things about discussion boards is the opportunity they create for direct student-to-student communication. Harness this potential by enlisting your students in the response process.
Ask students to respond—in relative detail—to one or two of their peers’ posts per posting cycle. As with the original posts, you’ll also want to make your expectations for student responses clear. Do you want students to pose questions? To provide suggestions for expanding on an informal writing piece? Or perhaps even to offer constructive criticism alongside praise? Making these expectations clear—and even providing models—will save you from a pile of comments that say nothing but “Great work!” or “Interesting.”
While students can do a lot of response work themselves, it is also important for them to know that you are reading their work. I try to read all student posts and responses from a particular posting cycle within a few days of the cycle’s end; then, I create one large post that addresses general themes in the discussion and highlights a few particularly strong posts and/or responses. This is a manageable amount of work and it gives students a “big picture” perspective on the discussion.
Integrating Discussion Board Posts into Your Syllabus
The expectations for the discussion board should be clearly stated on your syllabus: when you expect students to post, how much you expect them to post, whether you expect them to respond to the posts of others, etc.
Naturally, you’ll also need to determine how grading will work. You can assign individual grades to each post; for instance, Blackboard allows electronic grading of posts based upon a point system. However, chances are that your students are already getting plenty of grades from you for written work. The discussion board should be a low-stakes writing environment where students feel comfortable taking risks.
If you set clear guidelines for what the posts on the discussion board should look like, you needn’t provide individual grades on posts. Simply treat the discussion board posts as part of the participation or homework grade and give students credit so long as they follow instructions. If you feel like a student is not meeting expected standards, send him or her an email. There’s no need to suffuse the assignment with anxiety from the beginning—if an issue arises, you can always deal with it on an individual basis.
Also, be conscious of the demands that you are making on your students’ time. While a discussion board post might not feel like much, for some students it can become a time-consuming endeavor. I would suggest requiring no more than a single post a week, though the discussion board can still be utilized effectively with less frequent but lengthier posts.
Integrating Discussion Forums into Classroom Discussions
Perhaps the most radical thing about the discussion board is that it allows students some control over the larger conversation happening in the course. Using discussion board posts to gauge student questions and interests before class discussion begins can help you shape a lesson plan that addresses these concerns.
Integrating student feedback into your lesson planning not only creates a more student-centered classroom, it may even help increase student participation in in-class discussions and raise overall student interest in the course. I highly recommend telling students, when you first introduce the discussion board aspect of your course, that you will be building class discussions around their posts. When students understand the importance of their posts to the course, they’ll be much more invested in producing high quality and thoughtful work.
How to Set Up a Discussion Board on Blackboard
Setting up a discussion board in Blackboard is a relatively straightforward operation. Blackboard provides a detailed description of how to establish and edit a discussion board on their website.
After you’ve set up your discussion board, take time to determine your learning goals for the module, to develop prompts appropriate to those goals, and to integrate the discussion board posts into your syllabus in a clearly defined manner. A little preplanning can turn a discussion board into an invaluable tool for composition pedagogy.
Charlene Kinbote - Charlene Kinbote is a doctoral student in English literature. She lives in upstate New York.
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