The value of online discussion boards

I am a big fan of online discussion boards. I think they are a great way for students to interact in an asynchronous online environment, and when carefully defined, a valuable way for student learning to be assessed. Discussions allow for students to see what their peers are thinking as well as to carefully formulate their own thoughts on whatever the discussion topics are. I especially favor the advantage a discussion board offers over a classroom discussion: the ability to think through one’s response before presenting it to the class.

http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/showissue.cfm?volID=2&IssueID=8 has a pdf link for an article called "Increasing Students' Interactivity in an Online Course" which focuses on online discussions. Smith and Winking-Diaz studied how to get students to interact more in online courses and how to increase students’ understanding of the course material, surely two worthwhile goals of discussion boards. The course these authors were studying was Adult Educational Psychology which met face-to-face three times, at the beginning and the middle and the end of the course, but otherwise was conducted completely online. Online discussions were facilitated by the instructors and several instructional strategies were utilized in the study, all of which merit consideration. The strategy I would like to focus on, though, is “Response labeling.” Students were required to label their discussion postings with one of five labels—“Response,” “Comment,” “Query,” “Clarify,” or “FYI.”

“The purpose of response labeling was to assist the students and the instructor in sifting through the sometimes lengthy lists of postings.” This labeling method intrigues me, because one of the most common complaints made about discussion boards is that they are so hard to maneuver through, with so many comments about so many topics. It seems to me that labeling types of postings could help to keep discussion topics and reasoning clearer.

In general, in my personal experience the only way to keep up with an active discussion board is to check the board daily, making contributions when appropriate. Otherwise, one is left with an almost indecipherable hodge-podge of postings. Perhaps some sort of labeling system would allow a less frequent discussion board visitation schedule.