- Discussion forums and discussion groups serve several purposes in a distance learning course:
- They give students a feeling of belonging to a group rather than being isolated with their computer.
- They encourage communication among students and between students and teacher.
- They provide an opportunity for every member of the entire class or a smaller group within the class to participate. Unlike a classroom discussion where sometimes only the most vocal members participate, an online discussion requires comments by every member of the class, and every member of the group can see the comments of everyone in that group.
Teachers can use the Announcements section of the course to leave a message on the home page of the course for everyone in the class to read, but these announcements are informational. They do not provide the opportunity for dialogue. Teachers and student can use the e-mail feature of the Communication section to send messages to one person or several people at once, but since every student has a different email address, the student receiving the message thinks that he or she is the only one receiving the message. The Discussion Board, however, gives students a chance to respond to messages submitted by the teacher. In fact, in order for a student to use the Discussion Board, the teacher must first create adiscussion forum and when creating it, check the options to permit students to start their own discussion threads within the forum and to both edit and delete their comments. If the teacher wants the students to share files with each other (if they are working on a group project, for example), then the teacher should also check the option to allow file sharing before submitting the discussion forum.
If the teacher wants only a few students to participate in a discussion on a particular subject, the teacher would set up a discussion group by following these steps:
- Click on the Control Panel button.
- Click on the Create Group button in Blackboard 4.0. (To learn how to create groups in Blackboard 5.5, please click here.
- Then after naming the group and giving general instructions or some identifying description for the group, the teacher would select the students by following the commands in the dialog box for creating the group.
- The teacher would click on the "Return to Course" button at the top of the screen, click on the Communication button and then the Group Pages button.
- Inside the Group Page, the teacher would then enter the Discussion Board for that group and create a discussion forum in a process identical to the one described above.
The final steps are as follows:
- Create a gradebook entry for the discussion activities.
- Check to make sure the learning module or schedule also contains instructions and a purpose for participating in the discussion.
- Read the discussion regularly and reply to the entire group's messages in the discussion forum itself or via email to one member if the reply is private. (A teacher can also modify the discussion forum and block the participation of a participant who is not respectful or others in the group.)
- Enter a grade in the gradebook soon after the deadline for participation.
Tip: When evaluating students' participation in a group, open two browser windows. Use one to read comments by students. Use the other to enter grades in the gradebook.
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