Managing your Discussion Board: Strategies and Best Practices (11/16/2012)

Workshop attendees joined Marie Mika, Ohio State sociology instructor, to learn how she uses online discussion boards for student interaction, engagement, and assessment. During the workshop, we discovered how she makes discussion boards manageable in large (~60) classes and how we might adapt her strategies for use in our own online environments. Marie shared lessons learned from over five years of experience with teaching online and guiding student learning by facilitating scholarly discourse that leads to content mastery.

Marie led a conversation around the following topics:

• How to structure discussion forums
• How to grade discussion forums
• How to compose good discussion questions
• How to manage the workload
• How should you participate as the instructor?

In the discussion that followed, workshop attendees were invited to share more about their discussion board management strategies; Joni Tornwall will facilitated using a discussion board alternative in VoiceThread.

This session was part of the Teaching in Virtual Environments series at Ohio State.  If you would like to be on the mailing list for this community of educators, please email Joni Tornwall (.2). We meet several times per term to discuss the online teaching and learning environment and strategies for making it an effective place to teach and learn. Everyone is welcome. The Teaching in Virtual Environments discussion group held its first autumn 2012 term meeting on September 14, 2012.

Workshop resources:
Recommended book for college teaching:
McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers

Alternatives to traditional text-based discussion boards include:
Piazza
Screencast-O-Matic
VoiceThread
- The Teaching Without Walls web site provides some handy VoiceThread resources for instructors