Tips for Improving Online Discussion Boards

I LOVE creating discussion board assignments for my online courses! But I didn't always love them. It took me quite some time to really learn how to create discussion boards that were more engaging and innovative. In this week's blog post, I'll share a few tips that have helped me to enjoy them a bit more.

1. Create stronger discussion board questions

One of the things that has troubled me about Discussion Board activities is the practice of posting one question and having all the students in the course answer it. It's even worse when that one question has only one answer! Imagine there are 30 students in your course. How many different ways can each student answer the same question? Well, if it only has one answer, there's really only one way. However, if you are able to develop discussion board questions using the PEAR Approach as discussed in a previous blog post, this will help with receiving varied responses. However, this only solves half of the problem. There are still 30 students focusing on the SAME question.

2. Offer varied discussion board prompts

Instead of giving the entire class the same question to respond to for a discussion board activity, why not give students options for responding to a variety of discussion board questions? This way students can pick the question that suits them best. This not only makes it more interesting and engaging for them, but since they will be selecting an option of their choosing, it will potentially be more interesting for you to read/grade as well.

3. Create Small Group Discussions

While steps 1 and 2 will really help with improving your discussion board assignments, this last step is really the icing on the cake! This last tip will not only help you to create engaging assignments, but it will help with building a sense of community in your online course. You can break your students into small groups and then give them a variety of options to select from. If you like, you can add that only one student can select a particular option (but of course, this limits the availability of some prompts). Now, all students in the small group are answering different questions which increases engagement, particularly when it is time to respond to other classmates.

This is the strategy I have been using over the past few years and it has been working very well for me. I enjoy reading the varied responses that students share, and I have seen a lot more engagement among students.

Share in The Online Educator Facebook Group the Discussion Board activity you come up with by clicking the link HERE. Let us know which, if any, of the steps presented in this posts interests you most!

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