{"id":2665,"date":"2016-09-27T15:43:28","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T05:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/education-portfolio\/ei\/teaching@sydney\/?p=2665"},"modified":"2020-01-31T21:43:46","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T10:43:46","slug":"ill-see-discussion-boards-tips-engaging-students-semester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/ill-see-discussion-boards-tips-engaging-students-semester\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I&#8217;ll see you on the discussion boards&#8221;: Tips for Engaging Students this Semester"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIf you want to get the most out of this unit, I\u2019ll see you on the discussion boards.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is what Associate Professor Abelardo Pardo from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering tells his students. This statement suggests that these forums can provide students with opportunities in addition to those available in lectures, tutorials or labs. Online discussion forums can prompt students to consider how concepts and ideas from the classroom apply to phenomena observed outside university. They can be a space for students to clarify their understanding of lecture content with each other and with teachers and, for teachers, discussion forums can reduce the frequency of repeated administrative questions students ask as they\u2019re learning how to learn (for example, \u201cWhat\u2019s the word count on this assignment?). Sometimes, however, the discussion board landscape for a unit of study may resemble a lonely desert road occasionally made lively by a rolling tumbleweed. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As part of a 2015 Educational Innovation Grant titled, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pushing the Boundaries of the Online Discussion Forum,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> we asked coordinators of large first year units of study to try some strategies for enhancing their (and their students&#8217;) use of online discussion forums and to share their success stories. Some practical strategies that you can use now (yes, in week 10!) are:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Post sample questions<\/strong> (similar to the exam or final assessment): time and again students\u2019 behaviours remind us that &#8220;assessment drives learning&#8221;. Geoff Fripp from the University of Sydney Business School posted sample multiple choice questions (without answers) on his discussion forum ahead of the mid-semester exam. The students worked together to answer the question, sharing their rationale for the correct response and clarifying key concepts from the lectures. He also posted sample questions after the exam but before the results were released to students. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Let students know you&#8217;ll hold off replying\u00a0until they do<\/strong>: discussion forums provide unique opportunities for peer-to-peer support but often students will wait for a teacher to reply to their questions. Hong-Dao Nguyen from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences tells her students that she won&#8217;t respond until another student has attempted a reply to the question posted. But make sure you let your students know this (so they don&#8217;t think you have forgotten them), and encourage their effort when they do post.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Enable anonymous posts<\/strong>: this is a function in Blackboard (and other forums such as Piazza) that allows students and staff to post anonymously. For Abelardo&#8217;s students, it takes the <a href=\"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/education-portfolio\/ei\/teaching@sydney\/fear-anxiety-enemies-learning-53-powerful-ideas-teachers-know\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fear<\/a> out of asking what might be perceived as a silly question. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Redirect students to the discussion forums<\/strong>: Maram Alakhras (Faculty of Health Sciences) noticed students persistently emailing her with their questions instead of using the discussion forums. She would reply to their emails saying that others might be interested in the answer to their question as well and asking them to post it on the discussion forums where she will respond to them. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Seed the discussion forums with frequently asked questions<\/strong>: as teachers, you know what your students tend to ask. If the forums\u00a0are a little slow to start, Adam Bridgeman (in his former role as First Year Chemistry Coordinator) posts these questions in the discussion forums and answers them. If anonymous posts are enabled, he will sometimes post the questions anonymously, i.e. as a student, to demonstrate the function. Elin Lehnbom from the Faculty of Pharmacy also uses the anonymous posting function to reply to students&#8217; questions as a student and endorses this response as a teacher.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For more suggestions on how you can use discussion forums in your unit, please see\u00a0Teaching Insight 13, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/education-portfolio\/ei\/teaching@sydney\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/insight13-strategies-for-engaging-students-in-online-discussions.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Strategies for Engaging Students in Online Discussions<\/a>.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> The document summarises key strategies for promoting student use of online discussion forums that are supported by literature. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We would like to acknowledge and thank the Education Portfolio for funding this project and our participants who contributed their experiences and ideas. The team consists of Professor Adam Bridgeman, Dr Kathryn Bartimote-Aufflick, Dr Danny Liu, Dr Hong-Dao Nguyen, Associate Professor Abelardo Pardo, Associate Professor Charlotte Taylor and is led by Dr <a href=\"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/health-sciences\/about\/people\/profiles\/melanie.keep.895.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Melanie Keep<\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIf you want to get the most out of this unit, I\u2019ll see you on the discussion boards.\u201d This is what Associate Professor Abelardo&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":2672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,58,41,43,37,57],"tags":[128,139,140,97],"coauthors":[495],"class_list":["post-2665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-educational-excellence","category-engineering","category-medicine-health","category-science","category-teaching-tips","tag-blackboard","tag-discussion-forums","tag-piazza","tag-teaching","post-item","post-even"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2665"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11833,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665\/revisions\/11833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2665"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}