Discussion Forums

Discussion forums (also known as online forums, discussion boards and online discussions) have been around since the early days of the internet and have changed little over the years. The general principle behind them is to provide a place for people at a distance and at different times to come together to talk about a common subject.

Discussion forums have also featured in online learning from the beginning because they offer a great way to:

• foster engagement
• continue discussions that started in classrooms
• allow students to prepare for upcoming lessons
• provide a space for students to collaborate with each other
• create a place for working through ideas without having to be in the same place at the same time 

Many discussion forums around the internet are for asking questions and providing answers (Q&A), but usually in educational settings forums are for generating deeper knowledge about a specific topic or question posed by a tutor.  Many students find it easier to formulate their thoughts and respond better when they have time to reflect on a topic and carefully write their answers than they do on the spur of the moment speaking up in a classroom. Online forums allow these students to excel.

Engagement

Your online learning environment will have a discussion tool built in. There is little benefit to linking to an external tool as that will disconnect the discussion from the rest of your learning content and will create a barrier to engagement.

Your discussions should be as integrated with other learning as possible to avoid it seeming superfluous. While some tutors enforce participation by requiring certain numbers of posts, this can sometimes backfire and lead to pointless posting and poor morale. A better strategy is to design students work/assessments in a way that makes participation in online discussion the only way to fulfill a meaningful and important assignment.    

Here's more advice for using online discussions: Why our online discussion didn’t work (but yours can) 

• Add institutional link: support forum for incoming academic staff?