Think about the last time you completed a discussion board–were your responses genuine, or were they simply to earn a grade?
Discussion boards are busy work disguised as collaborative learning. For college students with a multitude of responsibilities, a discussion board is just another box on a lengthy to-do list. When completing these discussion boards, communication is surface-level compared to the real in-class conversation that could take place. Rather than having these in-class discussions, professors move this conversation to virtual platforms where they lose clarity of certain topics.
“Discussion posts are very superficial assignments given that sometimes teachers are just trying to pad out the grade book,” says Colin Schmitt, a third-year political science major. “Especially in big classes discussion posts are just like copy and paste, things said over and over again,” said Schmitt.
In courses I have taken at NC State, the responses almost always read like a script. Students just trying to make the word count and complete the assignment. The comments and responses are almost always non-beneficial and superficial. “If a discussion board is just an added homework assignment that you have to do that’s never discussed in class, never talked about, never acknowledged then no one is taking it seriously…I just do it for the points” says Morgan Maser, a first-year business administration major. “As time goes on I put less and less work into it because it is not a part of class. It doesn’t do anything for me,” said Maser.
Maser’s class, Introduction to Business Processes, includes an outside program called “Packback” to engage in a discussion board. These discussion boards are graded by AI that gives students a “curiosity score” and the discussion is never introduced or acknowledged in class. These discussion boards are assigned and both students and the professor apply the bare minimum.
This is blatantly unproductive and unuseful for students. If these are the students’ experiences, professors should also be able to spot the flaws in the discussion posts right?
Well, they do. Professors here at NC State acknowledge the issues that discussion boards have when implementing them into a course. Dr. Joseph Krylow, a professor at NC State who has taught various philosophy classes, notes that discussion boards do have some negative drawbacks as well as some positive ones if used correctly. “From the feedback I’ve gotten from other students, people say that the discussion is usually low quality. It’s just a bunch of people getting on there saying what they got to say, they get their requirement made and it’s pretty much [a] waste of time,” he said.
Dr. Krylow highlights a critical piece to making discussion boards effective, “To have it at a caliber where it would be useful for the student in a significant way. It would take more time for the instructor to oversee it.” He states that discussion boards can be a good tool for getting students to think critically outside of the classroom and introduce new topics. However, all his points come to a common conclusion that for it to be effective the discussion board has to make a presence in the classroom, class communication is pertinent.
Given this, it is clear that the use of discussion boards needs to be altered or discontinued. There are much more effective ways to use discussion boards than just additive assignments for students to complete or a filler for the grade book.
Discussion boards should be an assignment that introduces new ideas to spark discussion in the classroom so that students can benefit from well-thought-out ideas from their classmates that would not have been acknowledged or seen otherwise. Discussions should not continue to be brought completely offline where they lose their academic value. Discussions should still be prevalent in classrooms and discussion boards should not be used to replace them. Instead, they should be used to enhance in-class discussion.
Bring discussions back to class.
