I am relatively new to using online communities such as discussion board and wiki’s. I have used the discussion board on Blackboard as a formative exercise for students in year 1 of the Bachelor of Nursing (BN) programme, and I have been involved in marking a summative assignment for students in year 3 of the BN programme. I am about to write a summative assessment for students in year 2 of the BN which will use the discussion board on Blackboard.
From this limited experience and from reading, I have identified the following points:
•Be clear as to why a discussion board exercise is required rather than a class or face to face exercise
•Assess your student group before setting a discussion board task (age, experience with online exercises etc.)
•Be very clear about the goal of the discussion board exercise otherwise it doesn’t achieve what you expect
•Discussion boards don’t generally work for groups larger than 10, the literature states no greater than 7 and no less than 3 participants http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Idea/boards.html
•If you have a larger class split then into smaller groups to complete the exercise
•Decide if the exercise is a formative or summative exercise
•If you want all students to participate in a formative exercise then the exercise needs to be designed so that the discussion is clearly linked to in class readings and content
•Use open ended questions to guide discussion
•Discussion boards postings can be time consuming to mark if they are not set up well, for instance in Blackboard if you have too many in a group or do not limit the number of postings it can become quite cumbersome
•When allocating marks for a summative exercise develop a rubric for assessment and allocation of marks and make transparent the expectations e.g. one or more postings, quality of posting, evidence/reference to support content and the use of professional rather that ‘chat/text’ language
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Idea/boards.html
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Idea/gradingdiscussions.html
Pam
