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The Discussion Board is the best tool to use for in-class communication in your online course. The following tips help you set up and control the Discussion Board without limiting yourself or your students.

• Organize your questions with Forums. One practice is to make Forums for each chapter or section in your online course.
  • For example, you might make a Chapter 1 Forum and place all Threads (questions) relating to Chapter 1 in that Forum.
• Only ask one question per Thread. Discussions are easier to monitor and control by limiting each Thread to one question. Students also seem to respond better to single questions. Use multiple Threads to ask multiple questions.
• Try to act as a Facilitator and guide your online discussions. It is easy for students to get off topic in a Discussion Board, so let your students know when this is happening and bring their discussions back around to the original question.
• Try and keep a presence in the Discussion Board. Students like to know that you are monitoring the Discussion Board. You don’t have to respond to every post, but it is good to point out exceptional posts and comment to occasional posts.
• Use a discussion/grading rubric for the Discussion Board. To get the maximum potential out of online discussion, it is best to let your students know upfront what you expect to see in the Discussion Board.
  • Yes, No, I Agree are not excitable answers.
  • Answers should be three or more sentences in length.
  • All students must participate in each discussion.
  • Each student should make at least one response to another student.

The Collect feature lets you collect and read through a group of Posts from the same Thread on one page. You can sort the collection to display posts by a certain user, date, or subject.

Threads are most commonly used as Discussion Questions. Threads contain the actual discussion question for a Discussion Forum. Instructors post questions as Threads. Then students read through each Thread and are given the option to respond to that Thread. Students can also respond to other students in a Thread.

Setting up and maintaining a graded Forum

Think of a forum as the online location where discussion will take place around various topics. For example, an instructor may decide to create 1 Forum for each week of the semester whereby weekly discussions will be held.