I am thinking of running the mini conference about Online Discussion Forums. I have used a lot of different online application as a student and as well as a staff. I have discovered that there is a very less usage of discusion boards /Forums.
I have used Blackboard discussion Board- and i think it is a very useful tool in elearning. I would like to see why people arent using the discussion Board - or discussion forums.
I am not sure what should I call my conference - Discussion Board is specific to black board. but is simliar to any online forum or blog - where people are able to discuss ideas , projects etc and get feedback from others.
Should I generalise it to any online discussion forum, or make it a specific application like Blackboard - Discussion bord and stick to it. Just trying not to make the topic too broad.
These are my ideas... Please feel free to give me some comments.
Regards
Krishan Mani
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Left my comments on the course wiki: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:Facilitating_Online/course_mini_conference#Krishan.27s_Ideas
ReplyDeleteKrishan,
ReplyDeleteI think the size of the group accessing the forum is important. I use to have 100+ students on my courses in the UK, and the associated discussion boards were very active.
With the small groups at MIT, I find that no-one dares to be the first one to post even when you try to "force" them to post something.
I think that there might be something in the NZ psyche that make people consider that asking a question is a sign of weakness.
The other issue is that if you need to follow up the message board for 5 groups in Blackboard, you need to open 5 browser windows, as it does not seem to be possible to get alerts send to you when a message is posted.
I have this year used Google group with one group with mixed success (big progress!). This makes me think that the interface itself for the message board is important.
I had far more success generating discussion when I used a blog as a LMS...students found a lot easier and logical to follow than the BB discussion forum
ReplyDelete