Course Design: Discussion Boards
In this episode we explore how to make discussion boards a powerful and dynamic tool for connection and exploration in the online classroom.
Show Transcript
ANDREW COLETTI: Hello and welcome
back to this episode of The T in Teaching.
This episode is focused on discussion boards
and their place and importance in course design.
In this episode, our host, Jenny McNiven,
interviewed Professor Jim Thompson.
Jim Thompson is an adjunct professor
in Temple's School of Business, teaching subjects
like marketing and international business.
Professor Thompson is an alumni of Temple,
earning his bachelor in marketing in 1975.
Besides being an adjunct professor,
he also serves as an advisor to the student marketing SPO.
Jenny McNiven is a senior instructional designer
at Fox's Online and Digital Learning Department.
In addition to online course support,
she is the coordinator of Fox's Online Teaching Certificate
and heads the department's faculty training
and development program.
Thank you for listening and please enjoy.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Welcome back to this episode of The T
in Teaching.
I am senior instructional designer Jenny McNiven
with the online and digital learning department.
And I'm here today with Jim Thompson who
has been a full-time professor and adjunct here
at the Fox School of Business.
Jim is one of our discussion board experts.
Everyone loves talking to Jim about his use of discussion
boards.
And we thought it would be wonderful to have him
into the studio today to talk about how to make discussion
boards a powerful and dynamic tool for connection
and exploration in the online classroom.
So Jim, thank you so much for being here.
JIM THOMPSON: Very happy to be here, Jenny.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Excellent.
All right.
So we're just going to jump into some questions
so we can get right down to it and start
getting into the nitty gritty of discussion boards.
So to start off, I think, importantly, we
need to know where to start when determining
topics for our discussion boards in classes.
Ultimately, the discussion board should be tied back
to our course learning objectives,
but there's a lot of freedom in that
that may feel daunting to faculty
who are trying to design them.
So what would you recommend for where
we start with the process?
JIM THOMPSON: So let me do a little bit of background.
So I'm going to circle back to last fall.
So roughly a year ago from now, I
was going to be teaching an online course.
But it would be the first one that was mostly asynchronous.
I had taught a good number of online courses previously.
But this was asynchronous.
And we would only meet for less than an hour a week.
Normally, in previous teaching of the international marketing
class, I would introduce topics, and we
would talk about them in class.
But there was not going to be time.
So in working with Sarah from the Fox Online and Digital
Learning Group, she suggested maybe employing the discussion
board as a way to enhance the class.
And so that's exactly what we did.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Wonderful.
So you were basically like--
without having enough time in the classroom
to cover everything you wanted to discuss,
you were moving some of that discussion
outside of the classrooms and replacing it
with discussion boards, which is also wonderful
because discussion boards do count as contact
hours in our online classes.
So it's a way for your students to interact with each other
but also get quality input from you on the discussions they're
having regarding your class content, right?
JIM THOMPSON: Yeah.
And that's exactly how this got started.
Sarah recommended setting up the discussion board for this class
as a way to achieve some of the contact hours.
What ended up happening went way beyond that
and really surpassed my expectations.
So if you don't mind, let me--
JENNY MCNIVEN: Yes, absolutely.
JIM THOMPSON: --talk a little bit about that.
Normally, in the class, I find topics
that I would like to discuss.
And so I still was doing that.
And they're current marketing topics.
The nice thing about marketing as a field
is that every week, almost every day,
there are brands doing things that we can talk about
in class.
And that's true whether it's international or domestic.
And so I typically read four to five business journals
or emails every single day with articles about what
brands or companies are doing.
And so I decided topics for the class.
Last fall, there were 60 students in this online class.
And so I organized them into pairs, so 30 pairs.
And then each week, two or three of the pairs
would receive a topic to research
and then ultimately create a video.
So expanding on that a little more,
I would provide the topic.
I would give them a paragraph or two description
of what the topic was.
And I would give them some links to online sites to get started.
They would research the topic.
And then instead of writing a paper or something else,
they would do a video.
And I had said five to seven minutes max.
Pretty typically, they did about five and a half.
And they presented what they learned
about that particular topic to the discussion board.
And then every student in class had
to then comment on each of the videos each week.
JENNY MCNIVEN: That's wonderful.
I like how you, instead of making the discussion board
something that was teacher-focused,
where you were there, you were the expert giving them
something to go off of, you made the students
the facilitators of the discussion board
instead so that that was the interaction they were getting.
The students were responding to the work
that their classmates had done on topics that they were
familiar with and working on.
JIM THOMPSON: Yep.
JENNY MCNIVEN: I love that.
Absolutely great.
So once you've narrowed down on a topic like this,
how do you frame it within the discussion board format
to inspire great discussion or collaboration?
There's so many different ways to do it.
JIM THOMPSON: I just had the students
who were doing the videos post them by Monday evening.
And then all the other students in class
had till Thursday evening to watch and then post comments.
They might be comments where they agreed.
They may have disagreed.
There may be a point in the topic
where they wanted to expand.
And that's what happened.
I should mention, the students who
did the videos did a great job.
I was really impressed.
And actually, I was really impressed with the comments
that students made.
Maybe it's because it's a lot more interesting when
it's a fellow student than the professor.
But the students really--
they took it to heart.
They made comments.
Some students really expanded on it.
Some were students who were not from the US who had experience
in other parts of the world.
And so they employed that in their comments.
It really made for, I think, a great way
of learning within the class.
JENNY MCNIVEN: It sounds really fresh and different to me.
A lot of discussion boards can tend to feel kind of stale
because students are used to this singular format
that we've had for the last decade of here's the topic,
write one response, and respond to two other people.
But I really like how you flipped it around and made it
more about the work that the students were
doing to create their presentation
and then their response to that.
So there's obviously lots of ways to design
an impactful discussion board.
So how do you approach actually differentiating the discussion
boards you use throughout a class
so that they do stay interesting and engaging for students
so they aren't just doing the same thing every single time?
JIM THOMPSON: All right.
Well, again, I was using this during the course
of the semester.
So we didn't start with the videos until about four weeks
in.
So we had a number of things we were doing
in class up to that point.
And then I wanted to give students enough time
to research.
So I would give--
I would send the email to the two students
who were going to own a particular topic about
10 days in advance.
And then that gave them time to research the topic
and then talk to each other about what they
wanted to discuss on the video.
So each week, the topics were different.
So you asked about how do you keep it fresh?
Well, they were they were different.
They weren't always marketing-specific.
Sometimes it was cultural because a big part
of international marketing, international business
is understanding cultural differences between, let's say,
the US and other parts of the world and other countries.
And so I think that was a way to keep it fresh.
Another thing that I did was I didn't always
agree with the students' perspective.
Not that they were wrong.
It's that if they often--
or sometimes.
I shouldn't say often.
Sometimes had a perspective as the customer or the consumer
for a brand as opposed to, let's say, the brand itself.
And that allowed me then to pick two or three topics
or two or three items each week.
And then in our class, when we only
had 55 minutes to talk about those
and offer a different perspective than maybe
what was presented in the video or in the comments
and to offer--
the example here, as a consumer, it
makes sense what you're saying.
If you're the brand, here's how you
might look at it differently.
And so that's also how I incorporated it into class.
JENNY MCNIVEN: I like how you used your role as someone
who is more of a connector and someone who could propose maybe
different aspects for them to consider
as part of the discussion and the discourse.
That's great.
So discussion boards can be a really good medium
for discourse, obviously, between faculty and students.
But I think the secret sauce of a good discussion board
is how it connects the students and provides a space for them
to explore course materials and topics together.
So what other ideas do we have for keeping discussion boards
student-led rather than focusing on the faculty and the faculty
facilitation of it?
I like your idea of having students
bring their own content.
That's something I think you can do in a lot of different ways.
JIM THOMPSON: So I mentioned earlier,
marketing is a great discipline because everybody is an expert.
If you think about finance or accounting,
the students have to learn everything in class.
They may have some understanding.
But they have to learn pretty much everything.
And so I can see where it might lend to a professor doing more
talking because they're the experts.
In marketing, students are experts.
They can talk about brands.
They've seen advertising.
The Barbie movie came out this week.
There's lots of perspectives on that.
And so I really like having students
talk in class because their opinions are
completely valid for them.
They may or may not be representative
of others in class.
And that's OK because if other students feel differently,
they can offer those opinions.
And that came out in the discussion boards
where some students agreed and built
but others disagreed and said, well, here's what I think.
And I think it lends to a much better discourse
if there's not agreement all the time,
that it expands the way all of us think.
And I'm a little bit older than the average student.
And so I learned as well.
I mean, I was seeing perspectives from the students
that maybe I hadn't considered as well.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Do you find yourself surprised sometimes
at the students who maybe are not as comfortable on camera
during a synchronous Zoom session
perhaps who maybe come out and where
they shine is in the discussion board
where they have a little bit more time to put
their opinion and all of their perspective into one
really well-proposed context and provide not in a way that's so
confronting as being on camera?
JIM THOMPSON: So I actually think
that in this particular class, I asked for students to volunteer
to go first or second.
And so the students who are, I think,
more confident or less risk averse
are the ones who offered.
And so they did their videos first.
And they were OK with it.
And some other students made comments about how good
the video was, how great the students did.
And I think it made it OK for everybody else.
And so even those who were maybe a little more
introverted or concerned, I think felt OK.
And students who weren't from the US
and where English wasn't necessarily a first language,
I think they felt OK with it as well.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Yeah.
I think it's great to have discussion boards
as a way of allowing students who have different skill sets
or maybe are more comfortable in different situations
to show off or to really show up in a different way
through that context.
I know that I've actually been an online student several times
before where we've had discussion boards as part
of my online content.
And I've been in classes with good online discussion boards.
And I've been in classes with not-so-great online discussion
boards, discussion boards where I felt like they'd really
been just thrown in there to give students busy work
to do so they had something else to grade
and didn't necessarily connect to the rest of the content
or the class activities or what's been going on.
So what are your thoughts on how to really incorporate
discussion boards into what you're doing in class
time or related coursework?
JIM THOMPSON: Yeah.
So I want to do a tangent to something you said.
For this particular class, I explored videos in the vault.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Ah, the video vault. JENNY MCNIVEN: Ah, the video vault. [INAUDIBLE]
JIM THOMPSON: And many of them had been
created about 10 years ago.
And in marketing, 10 years is an eternity.
And then if you throw COVID and the pandemic in there
and then supply-chain issues that also happened
over the last five or six years and inflation,
it means that pretty much anything that
was in there was out of date.
But the other thing in a lot of those videos--
they were really long.
And I don't have a long attention span.
And so I didn't want to watch them.
And I sure don't want to create a long video.
But if I'm someone who's Gen Z who's
used to watching TikTok videos, then the content for the class
should be consistent with what they're used to.
And so I felt that saying five to seven minutes
was consistent with that.
And again, most of the students were roughly
five and a half minutes in length.
And I think that really contributes
to people paying attention because it's
consistent with what they're normally used to seeing.
And it doesn't require a lot of effort.
It's just a few minutes to watch.
And then you can comment afterwards.
JENNY MCNIVEN: Yeah.
I really like that approach because I've definitely also
had discussion boards where it was like,
watch this YouTube video that's 40 minutes long
and format your opinion on perspective on it.
And that's pretty taxing for a student who already
has a pretty heavy workload.
So being able to sit down and actually
connect with your fellow classmates
to watch them talk for five minutes
and then be able to respond and engage with that I'm sure
is something that actually keeps your students maybe
more excited about partaking in the discussion boards
and having that as part of their course curriculum.
JIM THOMPSON: Yeah.
I hope so.
I was actually quite excited when I was watching the videos
and reading the comments.
So hopefully, the students felt the same way.
JENNY MCNIVEN: That's great.
So finally, to wrap things up, how
would you encourage your fellow instructors
to make sure that they're keeping their discussion boards
relevant week to week throughout a course?
Not necessarily that they have to have one every single week,
but how to make your discussion boards relevant and maybe
responsive to what is happening in your classroom every week.
JIM THOMPSON: Right.
So I like having in-class discussions.
Again, I think they really add to the class.
And maybe it's easier in a course like marketing.
But it gave me ideas for topics for the future as well when we
got into discussions.
And I felt like maybe what the students
were saying was, again, pertinent for them
but not necessarily the way that, in this case,
international companies would think
about marketing their products.
And it gave me ideas to use for future topics
if I could find something relevant in the class.
JENNY MCNIVEN: That's fantastic.
I absolutely love talking about discussion boards.
I have enjoyed talking about them with you
and hearing your ideas and some of the fresh new ways
that you've introduced them into your classes.
JIM THOMPSON: OK.
Well, my pleasure, and thank you for having me.
JENNY MCNIVEN: You're so welcome.
JIM THOMPSON: It started with an idea from--
JENNY MCNIVEN: From an instructional designer.
JIM THOMPSON: From an instructional designer.
And now it will finish with more ideas.
JENNY MCNIVEN: It will go on to live forever
through our instructional design team.
I promise you.
Well, thank you again, Jim.
This has been a really wonderful discussion.
I appreciate it.
JIM THOMPSON: Thank you.
