A Starting Point

Happy new fall semester! Our students are back and while parking is a little tougher, I love the energy and freshness of the campus when classes start again in the fall. It's a whole new year.

So let's start the year on this blog with a more in-depth discussion of the tool with which I encourage everyone to start if they've never used a technology tool in their classes: the discussion board.

There are many discussion boards but when we say "the discussion board" we mean the Blackboard discussion board. There are many good reasons just from a housekeeping point of view to start with a Blackboard tool. More than 80% of our students have an active Blackboard class each semester, so chances are most of your students already know how to use it. It's easy to learn, for first-year students who might not have used it before. And because our Blackboard system is tied in with our student administration system, students and faculty can just click on the "Bb" icon in the portal at my.hofstra.edu and be taken directly into Blackboard.

Blackboard is far from an ideal pedagogical tool. Its reliance on the idea that teaching consists of giving handouts and collecting papers, for instance, annoys me almost every day except for those days on which it offends me. The discussion board is the finest of 1999 design, and students sometimes find it confusing that they either don't see posts once they've read them, or that they do see them all and have to move to the new ones. Once you give in and get used to the quirks of Blackboard's discussion board, though, you can use it very easily to do some very serious work.

I always prefer to introduce new tools by giving the students asynchronous work, that is, work that they're going to do outside of class. This is partly because computers are evil and will turn on you when you have your class staring at you. I prefer to give all the students a chance to work out their own technology issues for themselves. I refuse to become the Help Desk. Cries for password resetting help or fixing your computer's network connection need to be directed to the Student Computing help desk, not to the teacher. But you can help that process along by realizing that computers turn on the students occasionally too, and giving them, say, several days to complete an assignment online (such as contributing to a discussion board) is very helpful to all involved.

I also give every class an "I didn't see you swing". Students should get a shot at a practice post which doesn't count just to make sure they can get all the buttons under control. There may well be one or two students for whom web discussions are new (there are still a few students for whom this is new) and they need a chance to figure it out and perhaps go to Student Computing to get help before being required to do it for class. That said, however, the deadline on the second post is firm. Otherwise students may start to feel that the work isn't necessary for the class and let it go.

When I was in college I had a chance to take a year-long course with the wonderful Katrin Burlin, who asked us to turn in reading response journals every week. I know many of our faculty do something similar. It became clear to me as a student that other people were writing interesting things in their reading responses, and I wished I could read them. Photocopying all those journals is really inefficient (though there are some people who do it). But having the journals posted instead to a discussion board is very simple.

So no matter what I'm teaching, I ask the students to write a reading response post in the discussion board every week, usually by 10 p.m. a day or two before my first class of the week. I try to follow in Katrin Burlin's footsteps. She did an excellent job of preparing short lectures, and more importantly discussion, based on what had inspired or concerned students the most in their reading responses. I try to do the same.

Moreover, I ask students to respond to their colleagues as well as post their own response. In my classes it has not worked well to ask them both to post a statement and to post a response to at least one other person's statement. It seems to follow their inclinations better to just require them to post, and to discuss in class how to respond substantively with one another. ("I agree" is not a substantive post; "I agree for the following reasons..." may well be substantive.) Students who prefer to state their minds first do so, and other students who prefer to riff off of discussion tend to respond. My students know they only need to post once a week, but on good weeks (especially after midterms) discussion gets quite involved, and sometimes even tangents that we don't get time to explore in class may be followed by students who have the freedom of the electronic forum in which to do it.

I don't respond to everyone's posts after the first week or so, and even those first responses from me are just to get everyone steered in the right direction. Students know that they need to raise questions or points of interest, that they can respond to each other in an academic fashion as much as they like, and that I will be basing classroom discussion on what they discuss. They also know, because it's in my syllabus, that posting will be a certain percentage of their grade (usually something relatively low, like 10%), and that posting is required to pass the class. (I spell out that last part for the occasional student who figures she or he is going to ace the rest of the class so they can just ignore the pesky discussion board and they'll still have their 90.) The discussion board grading tool in Blackboard makes it easy to collect each student's posts for the semester, count them (if you are so inclined) and see them all in one place so as to grade the student's work. I just give credit for doing the assignment, and the grade falls each time they fail to post - four weeks without a discussion board post and they've basically opted out of an important part of the course, so I don't mind giving a 60 for it. (I tend to use 100-point scales for grades in my class.) But if a student fails to post for a week or two I do reach out to them and make sure they know how it's affecting their grade and ask if there's anything I can do to help.

I find this is a very effective way to use technology to get students thinking about the assigned work outside of class and to make sure they're keeping up with it all, as well as to give me pointers regarding what they find interesting and how to prepare for the week's classes. I don't know if many students nowadays would even regard this as much "technology" in the class. No Twitter, blog, podcast or clicker; but still, I think, a pretty effective use of technology for my pedagogical purposes.

I don't even think faculty should feel like a discussion board is "just" a place to start and that they must thereafter graduate to ever more current uses of technology. The discussion board tends to get contributions from students who are otherwise quiet in class, keeps all the students moving forward together, increases the time spent on classwork each week and increases interactions between students rather than with you. It meets all my requirements for a very up-to-date use of teaching technology. There are a zillion other ways to go if you want, but if you only used the discussion board effectively in your classes, I would think that you could consider yourself an instructor using teaching technology very effectively.