Surfacing the student voice: Discussion boards
Discussion boards provide a simple platform for students to critique, reflect, synthesise knowledge, and build a learning community with their peers and tutors. As such, they can provide efficient and powerful asynchronous learning opportunities. The discussions usually takes the form of looking at: conceptual understanding, evaluation, and analysis or tasks that help students apply knowledge within practice.
Benefits:
- Monitoring engagement – Engagement with discussion boards is an easy way to recognise how active your students are and how often they are contributing their views/thoughts.
- Assess level of understanding – Students’ responses to theoretical, conceptual or reflective questions will give an indication of their progress and understanding, and allow the opportunity to provide feedback.
- Build and maintain the learning community –Opportunity for social learning in an asynchronous way and provides a sense of connection to the group and tutors to reduce feelings of isolation when learning online.
We have collated a wide range of tips and ideas in conjunction with Dr Kelly Sisson, including managing your workload whilst using discussion boards. These can be found in the link below.