Incorporate Forum Discussion in Teaching

This is the last week of PIDP3250 course and I started to clear out my draft posts, and shared all of them here. Knowing myself well being a bit deadline-motivated, it is time to polish these draft versions, and got them "published". 

Being a very engaged in the forum discussion over the past seven weeks, I have been thinking about how to incorporate forum discussion into future blended course or face-to-face course. Undoubtedly online discussion forum forms a virtual classroom that students can interact with each other despite of time and space and benefit from meaningful interactions between themselves and faculty members (see previous post)  , interactions in the learning community, and self-reflective interactions between students and contents themselves. 

Image taken from http://www.rmcdocs.com/

Benefits of Incorporating Online Discussion Forum 

• Increase student engagement     Online discussion forum ensures equalized opportunities to "talk" (see my reflection of introversion in the classroom). It also appears to be more democratic and uninterrupted. 
• Enhance critical reflection and improve writing skills  Students are given more time to think through and organize their thoughts, and will "have to" write their messages in formal writing. There's no approach improving writing other than writing more. English is my second language. I was being intentionally reluctant to write an essay. Honestly I didn't enjoy writing at all because I never had to write excessively as a science major. All I needed to to is to present my quantitative results and focus my discussion on the scientific facts. The discussion forum has improved my writing, and surprisingly my interest in writing to a tremendous extend. 
• Promote social construction of knowledge and collaborative thinking    It is so convenient to see different perspectives. Students can construct new meanings collaboratively, or through self-reflective dialogue. At least I can't remember how many times new ideas kick in when I am writing. Because we are are sharing our experience, it naturally triggers new reflections. 
•  Allow incorporation of numerous various resources   How can you verbally announce a long url to the class and expect students to write them down? Here is the point. You can post videos, graphics, websites, upload a document, advertise your forum posts in the forum. You audience have immediate access through the link
• Increase flexibility  The asynchronous capabilities of online discussion forum allow students to share their opinions despite of time and space. 
• Provide a permanent record  Teachers can easily track the frequency and times students logging in, and participating in the discussion. All students' messages are automatically saved in a very organized way which provide both students and teachers great resources to refer to later. 

Disadvantages and Cautions

• Prevent overloads of information and work   The removal of time constraints can easily impose overloads on both teachers and students. This task is always ongoing, almost non-stopping. I really appreciate our instructor's note at the beginning of the course, telling them how many hours typically are needed per week, and "we are not expected to read every single post. It is not possible". Keeping this in mind did prevent myself from being overwhelmed. Designating students to facilitate a forum is also a good approach. 
• Lack of real social cues   There're no gestures, voice tones, facial expressions. We practically, don't know what our audience are thinking or feeling. It might be eventually difficult to promote the sense of belonging. In this sense, maybe social gathering is also important for online courses. This is not new. Coursera has built the national wide social groups for all online learners. It is necessary to post guidelines, such as online etiquette, and requiring respect and open-mindedness to different opinions.  
• Will they read?   I tried forum discussion before -- that wasn't successful. The topic is task orientated, letting students post their data table to the forum, so everyone can see, and evaluate their own data critically. This kind of topic doesn't insure the learner to read, and reflect on the postings. 
• Can they access? This is the technical aspect. I found the videos are great tools teaching students how to post a link, a video, and insert pictures in the forum post. 

Into Future Practices 

In order to better incorporate forum discussion in my practices in the future, here are the guidelines for myself 

• Know and monitor the impact   From the concept of visible learning (see previous post here), I need to fully understand how only how to use this approach, the benefits and costs of this adoption (and ..that's why I am writing this now),  and also think through the best way to integrate into the subject matter, and how it might end up affecting student's learning. 
• Be a reflective practitioner   After my attempt, reflectively analyze student's response, and their performance in forum discussion, as well as their progress in learning. Why does learning occur? or why not? Is this worth time and effort? 
• Use online discussion forums to (the purposes) 
• Promote thoughtful responses (not just copy and paste, but in-depth thinking and understanding, sharing related experiences and feelings) 
• Establish learning community 
• As formative assessment, where we track student's learning, validate their work, and motivate further endeavor. The postings on the online forum allow teachers to achieve a greater understanding of student's strength and weakness that could be overlooked otherwise.
• Use self-assessment
• Write summaries  Either written by a teacher, or a student, summaries are more than beneficial to learning. It also presents a thoughtful and organized work to be re-read later. The key points in the summary provide learning efficiency. 

Future Reading List of Discussion Forum 

List of Discussion Board Posts on Faculty Focus http://www.facultyfocus.com/tag/discussion-board-assignments/ 

Incorporating Online Discussion in Face-to-Face Classroom Learning: A New Blended Approach http://www.citejournal.org/vol11/iss4/languagearts/article2.cfm

A six-stage approach is proposed in this article that very elaborately implements online discussion forum into face to face class. 

Figure taken from http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet23/chen.html