“Discussions are boring”, “it is so hard for students to truly engage,” “the linearity of the discussions doesn’t help to navigate and find the threads”, “posts could be AI-generated.” If you’ve voiced one of these about discussion boards, you’re not alone. Oftentimes, I hear instructors express these concerns. Discussion boards were once considered spaces for bringing students together to engage in authentic and genuine conversations. However, in today’s AI world, the concerns are compounded by the risk that discussion posts could be generated by AI, lacking students’ own voices and personal investment in building community.

What is not working with discussion boards?

Discussion boards have been the default tool in online courses to create a space for students and their instructors to build community, engage in conversations, develop a sense of belonging, and learn from one another. The discussion board is the online counterpart of the physical classroom space.

However, over the years, it seems discussion boards are limited in that they hardly promote student engagement and expand conversations. For many instructors, discussions have become a formulaic “post one and reply twice” approach that lacks the features to truly motivate students to participate beyond that formula. It has even become more challenging to create an engaging asynchronous discussion in the AI era, as some students might feel tempted to use AI to generate posts.

What can work better?

Designing discussions that are meaningful and engaging may require evaluating their use and structure. The design of discussions sets the foundation for students to be in community, understand the value of the activity, and actively engage with others. This foundation should respond to a clear structure where the purpose, tasks, and criteria for success are clear.

There are multiple ways in which discussion boards go beyond that formula, becoming spaces that hold the community of learners together. It is possible to design and facilitate online discussions that are engaging and meaningful, and that serve as dynamic learning spaces where students get to know their peers, engage in community, and build trusting relationships with each other and with their instructor.

How to redesign discussions in the AI era?

An AI policy should be clearly articulated so that students know whether AI can be used or not in their discussion posts and replies. Instructors could opt to co-create an AI policy and involve students in identifying actions and tasks that could benefit from, or not benefit from, the use of AI in their discussions (and other assignments). However, given that discussions are one of the few course activities where the process of student-to-student interaction matters more than a polished product, an AI policy alone may not help address the concern that posts could be entirely generated by AI.

In response to the AI era, it becomes even more important to ensure that the discussion board has a clear purpose and meaning for students. A purpose statement highlights the importance, relevance, and value of students’ own work and voices, and shows students that their instructors are eager to read their contributions. AI cannot replicate students’ own thinking and authentic voices. A clear description in the purpose statement and instructions that repositions the value of authentic student voice and contributions would make it visible to students that their instructor is interested in what they bring from their own context, lived experiences, or observations.

To make discussion prompts more engaging and tempting for students to bring their own voices, ask students to bring an artifact such as a news item, a course reading annotation, or a real-world example to share with peers. Then, ask them to respond to peers’ artifacts rather than to peers’ opinions. The input is the student’s own context, which sidesteps the AI temptation and makes the engagement more natural, relevant, and genuine.

Don’t feel discouraged by the shortcomings of discussion boards; these are great tools for creating the social interactions and community so desired in an online environment, even in the AI era and its challenges for teaching and learning. The key to using discussion boards is to rethink them as spaces for genuine engagement rather than as superficial, perfunctory tasks. Rethinking and redesigning discussions could start with small steps, for example, if you do nothing else:

Articulate clearly why students need to contribute and participate in the discussion. What is the value they will get from being in the conversation and community with others?
Describe your AI expectations in the discussion instructions, not just link to or add them in the syllabus. How would students benefit from using or not using AI when posting and replying?
Make one discussion prompt more meaningful, connected to students’ lived experiences. How do the topics discussed relate to students’ lives and communities?
Add reflection questions to the factual/descriptive prompts. How do students’ thoughts evolve as they engage in the discussion? How would students apply the concepts in other scenarios?

If you have tried something else or different, I would like to hear about it.

By Susan Fein, Instructional Designer, susan.fein@oregonstate.edu

In my role as an instructional designer, the faculty I work with are often looking for ways to increase student engagement and add a “wow” factor to their online course. One way to do that is to add or increase active learning practices.

Active learning requires students to do something and think about what they are doing, rather than simply listening, as with a passive-learning lecture (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Active learning brings positive and lasting outcomes to students, including better retention and grasp of concepts, and is particularly evident when students work together to develop solutions (Chickering & Gamson, 1987).

Tackling Discussions

In 2019, I worked with an instructor developing a biochemistry/biophysics course for Ecampus. The instructor loved the peer-to-peer interaction intended for discussions, but was discouraged by the often lackluster exchange commonly demonstrated in the posts. She wanted to liven up these conversations, not only to increase the strength of the community but also to have an impact on the value of the learning that took place.

Enter knowledge boards! With a simple but creative retooling of the predictable initial-post-and-two-replies format, the instructor found a way to reimagine the often mundane discussion board and transform it into a lively and highly engaging conversation and exchange of knowledge.

How did she do this? Rather than compel all students to respond to a narrow or artificially-constructed prompt, the instructor instead posted several relevant topics or short questions extracted from the concepts presented during that week’s lectures and readings. Topics might be a single word or a short phrase, and the questions were tightly focused and direct.

Choice and Agency

From this list of 5 to 10 conversation starters that give breadth to the topics, the students can choose which they want to respond to, often selecting what’s of greatest interest to them. These posts could be anything related to the topic or question, so students are free to approach from any perspective or direction.

The instructor found that the students more freely contributed ideas, insights, understandings, questions, confusion, and commentary. They were encouraged to ask questions of each other to delve into significant points. Students could engage in as many conversations as desired, at their discretion. As a result, they tended to be more actively involved, not only with the content and concepts from that week’s materials, but also with each other, producing a strong community of inquiry.

This simple change transformed the tired and (dare I say it?) potentially boring weekly discussion into a meaningful opportunity for a lively and valuable knowledge exchange. The instructor explained that students also report that this knowledge board becomes a study guide, summarizing multiple approaches and insightful content they use for studying, so many revisit the posts even after that week is over as a way to review.

But Wait…There’s More!

The instructor didn’t stop at discussions in her pursuit of increased engagement and active learning. Her next “trick” was to evaluate how the assessments, especially homework problems, were presented.

A typical format in many Ecampus courses is to have students complete homework assignments individually, and these are generally graded on the correctness of the answers. But once again, this instructor redesigned a conventional activity by applying principles of active learning and collaborative pedagogy to improve learning outcomes.

In the new version, students first answer and submit solutions to the homework individually, and this initial phase is graded on proper application of concepts, rather than on the correctness of the answer. Next, students work together in small groups of 3 or 4 to discuss the same set of problems and, as a group, arrive at consensus of the correct answers.

The active learning “magic” occurs during this critical second phase. If one student is confident about an answer, they present evidence from the lectures and readings to persuade their peers. And when a student is not certain that they correctly grasped the concepts, they discuss the problem and relevant principles, learning from each other through this review, hearing different perspectives and interpretations of the materials. It is through these vital peer-to-peer interactions that the active learning takes place.

As the last phase of the activity, the group submits their answers, which are graded for correctness.

This reshaping of a classic homework activity results in deeper levels of understanding and stronger knowledge retention (Weimer, 2012). And there’s an added benefit for the instructor, too. Since there are fewer papers to grade, formatting homework as a group submission means extra time to offer more and better feedback than would be feasible when grading each student individually. A win-win bonus!

Benefits of Active Learning

These are just two simple but ingenious ways to reformat classic forms of interaction and assessment.

Do you have an idea of how you can alter an activity in your course to make it more interesting and engaging? If you sense that your online course could use a boost, consider incorporating more active learning principles to add the extra oomph that could transform your teaching content from mundane to magical!

So let’s close this post in true active learning style and take a moment to reflect. What kinds of active learning practices have you tried in your course? How did those go? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please share in comments.

References

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning; Creating Excitement in the Classroom (Vol. Education Report No. 1). Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987, March). Seven Principles for Good Practice. AAHE Bulletin 39, 3-7.

Weimer, M. (2012, March 27). Five Key Principles of Active Learning. Retrieved from Faculty Focus: https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/five-key-principles-of-active-learning/

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Discussion Boards: Should They Stay, Go, or Revamp in the AI Era?