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Managing the Discussion Board for Large Sections

Why?

• Unlike a large F2F lecture section, the number of students in an online course has direct impact upon the number of instructor responses to the discussion board.
• Management strategies are one way to effectively and efficiently use the discussion board with large sections.

Thoughts.

Just thinking about responding to a large number of postings can be overwhelming. Then, you are faced with the time required to navigate to the postings and key in your responses. If you have 50 postings and spend just three minutes per posting, you will invest two hours and 30 minutes on this set of responses plus the time to navigate to each posting. If you do this for ten class sessions, you will spend well over twenty-five hours responding to postings.

Let’s compare this to the work done in a face-to-face class of comparable size. Do you feel obligated to directly talk to each student for three minutes for every class meeting? Probably not, you most likely talk to the group and individualize as time allows. Do you answer questions posed during the class? Probably, but your responses are overheard by the group and used by the group. Do you provide individualized feedback to each student every class meeting? Probably not, feedback often takes on a group dimension and is used to clarify points for the entire class.

It is important to establish your presence as the instructor in a distance course but this doesn’t mean that you must respond to all postings. There are several ways to structure the discussion board to manage the amount of instructor posting, freeing time to work with students in other ways. It is important to realize that none of these techniques should be used excessively in any course. Like most things in life, moderation is important. The techniques listed below can be combined in many different forms to provide variety to the discussion board.

Planned Individual, Small Group, and Large Group Interactions.

One way to reduce the volume of postings is to plan various types of responses. Some discussion is best suited for individualized responses while others are better suited for responses to groups or the entire class. We suggest you clearly explain to students the types of responses they can expect to receive for each discussion. From the students’ perspective, this looks like a varied feedback strategy and is appreciated. From your perspective, you have reduced the overall time investment for responses.

Use of Summaries.

Providing a summary of the postings on the discussion board is one way to show presence, provide feedback, and prompt additional thought. You read through the postings and take brief notes on trends you see in the postings. You use these notes to create a single posting to explain these trends, clarify points of confusion, and to insert new information based on the responses.

Group Postings.

Establishing groups and requiring these groups to reach agreement on a single posting is another way to reduce the number of postings you generate. Provide a group area where the group can work over distance to develop their posting and then have one member of the group post their response to the course discussion board.

Model Moderation and Use Student Moderators.

A portion of maintaining the discussion board is tracking responses, maintaining order, and encouraging reluctant posters. These are skills that students can learn. One way to reduce the amount of posting required of you is to push some of this responsibility to students. Moderate one discussion and clearly make the skills required to sustain the discussion visible. You can then assign student moderators (as individuals or groups) to moderate and sustain the discussion throughout a particular time period.

Lurking as a Strategy.

There are times when it is a good strategy to tell students that you will lurk during the discussion. Explain that you will read all posts but that students should not expect a post from you during the discussion.

The greatest danger to an effective distance course is to become overwhelmed and provide no feedback or presence through posting to the discussion board. Students perceive that you are not interested in the course or in them. Posting too frequently creates problems as well. Gilly Salmon (2000) suggests the ratio should be in the range of 4:1 (4 student postings for each instructor posting). 

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