Pedagogical Tips

1. Create a Topic for each discussion and ask students to post their messages in the appropriate topic area. If you allow students to post in the Main topic area, the number of threads and messages quickly becomes confusing.
2. Clearly communicate your expectations regarding student participation in discussions. How often do you expect students to read the posts? How often do you expect them to post messages? Do you want them to reply to other students' messages as well as post their own original messages?
3. Clearly communicate the participation that students can expect from you. How often will you be reading their postings? How often will you be posting replies? Will you respond to each of their postings? If one of your primary purposes in using the discussion board is to facilitate communication between students, you may want to have a "quiet" voice in the discussion, only responding to students when you need to re-focus the discussion or when a question goes unanswered. (There is a fine balance between too little participation by the instructor, which can discourage students' individual participation, and too much participation, which can discourage communication among students.)
4. The best way to demonstrate to students that you value their participation in discussions is to make their participation count in the final evaluation for the course. Evaluating the quality and/or quantity of a student's postings in discussions can be an objective way to evaluate their participation in your course. Let students know what their participation grade is at periodic intervals and give them advice on how to improve their grade.
5. Create private topic areas for groups of students doing collaborative projects. This gives them a space for team discussions not restricted by space or time.
6. Some students are quite comfortable communicating in an online discussion; some are not. Closely monitor students participation, particularly in the beginning, giving encouragement, guidance, and advice to those who are not participating in discussions.
7. Encourage students to use Discussions to post questions that other students may have as well. In this way, the instructor need only respond once instead of having to responding to several emails asking the same question. You may want to set up a special topic area ( eg. Water Cooler, Student Lounge) for these kind of postings.
8. If you don't want to respond to a student publicly in Discussions, Reply Privately to the student, which sends the reply to the student's Mail box. Encourage students to use the Reply Privately option for responses that don't add value to the discussion (eg. a congratulatory posting, chit chat, "I agree."). Be sure to include the Mail tool in your course so that Reply Privately is an option.
9. Discuss with students the difference between criticizing another person's ideas and criticizing the person. Give them suggestions of how to constructively disagree with something that someone else has written (eg. "You've expressed an interesting idea, but have you considered . . ."). Students need to understand that "while it is okay to dispute an idea, it is not okay to disparage a fellow student." (Web Resources Staff, Georgia State University, 2001, p. 134)
10. The following are examples of strategies instructors have used to encourage participation in discussions:

• Post a "starter" question in the topic area. Design questions that are open-ended, relevant to the course, and of interest to students.
• If the starter question elicits a pro or con response, have half the class post a pro response and the other half a con response. Then ask students to argue and defend the position statements.
• Ask students to respond to a question or statement from a particular perspective. For these types of questions, role-playing or assigning roles to students often makes for an interesting and illuminating discussion.
• Create a topic area where students can start threads of conversation about topics not covered in class or in other online discussions.
• For large classes, divide students into "teams" with the stipulation that students post and respond to only the topic areas for their team.
• Appoint students, individually or in pairs, to be facilitators of different topics. Have them post a summary of the messages at the end of the discussion.
• Set the parameter that the instructor will not respond to a message until at least two other students have responded. (Web Resources Staff, Georgia State University, 2001)
• Use an anonymous topic for questions where you want to gauge existing opinions or take a straw vote.
• Select the best posting or postings in a topic and explain your choice to students. This is particularly effective for the first few discussions because it communicates your expectations to students and gives them concrete examples to strive for in the future.
• Have students grade themselves by compiling their three best postings, along with an explanation of how the postings support the grade. (Web Resources Staff, Georgia State University, 2001

Technical Tips

1. Remind students to click the [Update Listing] button after posting a message in order to see the message they have posted. Further explanation: When you [Post] a message, the message window disappears and you are looking at the "old" listing page. To refresh the page, you should click on [Update Listing].
2. Students also think messages have disappeared because they are looking at the window of [Unread messages]. Tell them to click on the [All] button to see both the read and unread messages.
3. Remind students to [Preview] their message before posting it. Once they [Post] a message, it cannot be retrieved for editing or deleted (except by the instructor).
4. If you post the full URL for a Web site, beginning with the http://, it will automatically appear as a link in the discussion message (eg. http://www.webct.com).
5. To view all the message in a thread, click on the "View Thread" button (the button with the magnifying glass) to the left of the thread's topic.