Discussion forums

I am sure that you are familiar with what a discussion forum is but would you know how to use one to support your classroom activities?

You can attach a forum to any of your modules and use it in various ways to enable students to communicate whist they are away from the classroom.

When setting up forums, it is useful to think about how you are going to encourage students to engage. Will this be an assessed part of the module, could it be a way of generating formative assessment or is it just for general enquiries?

General enquiries

A good place to start, is to create a discussion forum for general enquiries. Students can be encouraged to use  this type of forum to ask questions about content, assessment or general course management. You might want to subscribe to this type of forum, so that you receive email updates in Outlook as soon as anyone leaves a post, this will enable you to respond quickly. You can also use this forum as a repository for all module students – rather than answering the same question again and again for individual student, think about posting your replies to the forum and telling students to check all the posts there. (It goes without saying that personal issues should not be dealt with via the discussion forum).

Informal chat

Secondly, you might want to set up an informal chat room, where students can talk about things outside of the classroom and get to know each other. This stops the other forums becoming congested with personal chit-chat. As a general rule I don’t subscribe to this forum, but I do monitor it from time to time.

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Active Learning

Thirdly, use the discussion forum for active learning. It is the simplest method of creating conversation, discussion and debate.

The following three links give some suggestions for using the discussion forum in conjunction with classroom activity.

The benefits of discussion forums

Ideas for collaboration

and Grading the discussion contributions for assessment.

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