Engage Your Students With These 3 Discussion Board Strategies

The discussion board is perhaps the most ubiquitous content type in digital education. Unfortunately, this overuse has often transformed what can be an engaging social learning opportunity into a rote and lifeless box to check for students. In our progressively more asynchronous world the humble discussion board deserves a return to its roots as a premier opportunity for student interaction. Here are three strategies to reinvigorate your discussion boards to promote meaningful dialogues and connections with your class.

Transform the Transactional

Discussions do have value as knowledge checks and reflection points. However, when utilized this way they can frequently feel “dead” and students perceive them as transactional. In order to promote social learning moments discussions need to feel alive, and in fact, be living.

Tips to Bring Discussions to Life:

• Set clear expectations for depth of involvement in live sessions and on the discussion boards themselves.

• Be active in the discussion yourself. Reply regularly, create your own posts, spur students by connecting their responses to others in the class.

• Bring what was discussed asynchronously into your live sessions, bring live discussion perspectives into asynchronous discussions.  

Engage Authentically

Humans rarely communicate in static blocks of thought/speech/text. Allow for freedom in expression in your discussions that better reflects actual human communication. The basic format of a discussion has not changed in years but technology has improved the breadth of options classes have when replying to each other.

Be More Authentic by:

• Promoting the use of likes/upvotes/emoji reactions (technology dependent).

• These echo the real life nods and thumbs up (or frowns) students receive when speaking in class.

• Likes (and similar) can also be used to track student participation with a discussion. For example students might be required to “like” a certain number of posts a week.

• If you have been on a text chain, in Slack, or on a Google Chat in the last few years you know how common gifs and memes have become in how people communicate digitally. Embrace this by using gifs and even short video links in posts and replies (reinforce decorum of course).

Do More Than Discuss

A dry prompt requiring a single response will only elicit dry responses. Discussion Boards can be so much more. 

Differentiate Your Discussions by:

• Hold discussions as role plays, where students must respond in character or with a specific (or chosen) perspective. Use their responses to foment an in-class debate.

• Case Studies are another old standby that fit snugly into a discussion board format. This can be leveled up by having students bring their own cases or articles to prompt other student responses.

• Let students drive the discussion. Co-facilitate by allowing certain students to be in charge of the discussion each week. These leaders can start off the initial post and keep the conversations going during the week.

• Go on virtual scavenger hunts where students find and share articles/videos that are relevant to the prompt, by the end the class will have a bevy of resources related to the content.

It is time to dust off the discussion board. With clear expectations, active engagement on your part, and some new twists offered by new technologies, the discussion board can and should be an active component in the social learning and community building of a digital classroom.