Using Discussion Forums to Foster Interaction in Online Courses

One of the challenges in online courses, especially online courses that are asynchronous in nature, is creating opportunities for interaction among students and their instructor in a format that encourages iterative dialogue.  For online courses, the most widely use method for this kind of interaction is the discussion forum (Simonson, Smaldino, & Zvacek, 2015).  Boettcher & Conrad (2010) state that the discussion forum in an online course is the equivalent of a whole class or small group discussion in a traditional on-ground course.  Additionally, discussion forums allow students to engage in learning at higher intellectual levels than a focus that is solely upon the recall of information because they are interacting with other viewpoints and perspectives brought by their peers (Morrison, Ross, Kalman, & Kemp, 2013).

Think back on your own experiences of a student and reflect upon an online discussion forum you were involved in.  Did the prompt to which you were responding relate to the content presented in the rest of the module?  Was the discussion prompt written in such a way as to encourage critical thinking and dialogue?  How did you and your fellow students interact with each other?  Was discussion lively and robust or was there minimal interaction?

By Wednesday: After reflecting upon the discussion forum above, answer the following questions:

• Was the writing prompt effective?  Why or why not?
• If you could change the prompt to make it more effective in encouraging robust interaction, what would you change and why?

By Sunday: Read a selection of your colleagues' responses to the writing prompt.  Respond to at least two of your colleagues with the following:

• Support what your colleague stated with examples of your own.
• Take a "devil's advocate" view and respond to a colleague from a different perspective.
• Share something you learned from reading your colleague's response.
• Ask a question or make a suggestion.

Be sure to support your initial response and follow-up posts with academic resources from this module as well as adding some that you have researched on your own when addressing this topic.

Review the scoring rubric to understand how your work will be assessed.

References

Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R. M. (2010). The online teaching survival guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Morrison, G. R., Ross, S. M., Kalman, H. K., & Kemp, J. E. (2013). Designing effective instruction (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., & Zvacek, S. (2015). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (6th ed.). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.