If you ask a student to tell you a story about their weekend or describe their favorite show, odds are they’ll provide a detailed description complete with anecdotes that—whether they know it or not—show a depth of understanding in their story that you would love to see them demonstrate in their papers.
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Telling stories is a key component of student learning. Through stories, students are able to create an understanding of the materials presented in class. However, when tasked with sharing stories that relate to what they’ve learned, students aren’t always as forthcoming with the material.
Thankfully, due to modern technology, there are many options beyond the traditional classroom share-out for students to show their understanding. One of those options includes virtual discussion boards. Educators can turn to this tool as an option for facilitating classroom rapport.
My students start each day with a post on the school learning platform’s discussion board. The virtual discussion board works as a digital poster board for students to share ideas and connections. Posts include commentary about the nightly readings, analysis questions with thoughtful answers, or even a class check-in on the events of the weekend. Although we use the learning platform Blackboard, there are many free online options that educators can use. These include Padlet, Google Classroom, and Wakelet.
I’ve found the following four key benefits from student-led discussion boards in my ninth-grade classroom.
Discussion boards present students with an opportunity to prepare for a future that is continuing to evolve digitally. My goal is always to prepare my students for a world and workforce where they have the skills they need to succeed, and using virtual discussion boards is one way to accomplish this goal. With teacher facilitation, discussion boards provide an opportunity for students to learn proper digital etiquette when interacting with peers, disagreeing, and adding substance to their answers.
I coupled my use of discussion boards with class PowerPoint lessons in online etiquette and media literacy. By the end of the first semester of discussion board usage, my students know the appropriate behaviors for how to disagree and commit, provide an example for their disagreement, and defend their answer with evidence from the text. As a result of consistently using discussion boards, I saw an increase in both the length of students’ discussion board responses and the substance of their posts.
As a language arts teacher, I have a level of flexibility in my classroom that allows me to vary the prompts to my discussion board questions, which is a practice that many subject matter teachers can apply to their own classrooms. This variety allows students to show their understanding through an array of question stems. For example, I’ve used question stems such as prompts that tie into the literary term discussed in class, text-to-self connection stems, and inquiry prompts at the start of a new unit.
Although I provide the question stem, my students are still the drivers of the conversation. Through their responses to peers’ questions, students are able to lead the discussion and pivot it to conversations that they think would aid in their knowledge. This might mean that students take the conversation to a topic that I hadn’t originally planned, but in the process, it builds a new level of understanding with the material. This student-led aspect not only expands on their understanding in relation to the question being asked but also allows them to explore topics and conversations they might not have yet considered.
Discussion boards allow me to check for understanding without tying a grade to their completion. Although numeric value is a good progress point for students, it can also be seen as a detriment when students feel swayed by the impact of a grade and make sure that their answer fits the teacher’s goals instead of their own.
Teachers and students can use discussion boards to access learning without awarding numerical value to it, which alleviates the pressure and fear of grading. This lack of fear allows students to elaborate on their answers with their true feelings instead of simply stating what they think the teacher is looking for in their answers.
Discussion boards create a digital portfolio of units that learners can turn to for review. Not only do discussion boards allow students to track their understanding throughout a unit, but when boards are used in a system that stores user content (such as Canvas or Blackboard), students can access information when they need to review for exams or refresh their memory on concepts presented.
My students frequently turn to the discussion board when reviewing materials for the summative assessments at the end of each unit for the book that the class reads. They are able to start at the beginning of the unit posts and work forward, reviewing their thoughts and responses in the process. The combination of access to their materials and the ability to see their peers’ responses creates a library of information that they wouldn’t have been able to find in a simple review guide.
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We’ve all likely used them in our private life. From posting in the cycling club’s chatroom about meetups after work to sharing recipes with fellow amateur chefs to looking for answers or asking questions to resolve an issue with a consumer product, discussion forums and question and answer forums open the door to information sharing on our hobbies, lifestyle, and interests. But how can they benefit businesses?
From streamlining customer service operations to generating a wealth of useful content to be recalled and reused at a later date, the advantages of installing a discussion forum or question and answer forum as a tool for your business’ online presence are many.
In this article, we’ll tell you five benefits that your organization can experience, right now.
Posting on a discussion forum is a quick, easy and accessible way of asking questions, getting answers, and retrieving information. When compared to a customer service call, the barriers to entry are much lower. By simply offering a discussion forum or question and answer forum as a platform for your customers and prospects to voice their opinions and ask questions, you’re removing a barrier – the traditional call – which many may not wish to do. Some examples of why include: the issue is not considered important enough to sit in a call queue, the customer does not have the time to wait, or the customer does not want to complain to a person over the . As a result of this, more issues get resolved and better brand trust is built through digital tools such as discussion forums and question and answer forums as part of a brand’s online community experience.
As mentioned above, issues can be resolved over a discussion forum or question and answer forum.
Starting with a simple search from a popular search engine or from the search bar on a web self-service page, customers and would-be customers, are presented with relevant, helpful resources in various forms.
Conversational knowledge, that which is created organically as a result of discussions or questions and answers, is discoverable. Curated knowledge, which is often created as a result of conversations and then structured into short concise formats like FAQs or knowledge articles, is also discoverable. These are all great resources for self-service and self-resolution.
If customers or would-be customers are unable to find what they are looking for, they can engage others for help. We call this audience of other viewers and visitors “the crowd”. They can start a discussion or ask a question and wait for the crowd to respond. The crowd is made up of company employees, subject matter experts, or moderators. And, the crowd is made up of even more non-employees that just want to help others because they too received help from others in the past. This equates to incredible scalability with fewer employee resources involved supported by helpful fans of your products and services.
Find out more about our forum software options.
Having the aforementioned pool of searchable content means that users will start to use your discussion forums and question and answer forums as a useful resource, increasing your brand’s reputation and growing insights it can use for product and service improvements. But beyond the initial use of this content, what’s also happening is that your business creates its own search engine optimization strategy. By automatically having this organically-growing bulk of content, which will naturally be targeted to key terms for your brands, you should see an accessible body of useful content start to form. Your marketing department or select digital agency partner can show you how to take advantage of this build-up of content with a solid SEO strategy.
Although we briefly touched upon this earlier in the article, the importance of having a long-lasting, well-trusted digital community, “your crowd”, cannot be stressed enough. As time goes on, these same users will return again and again to self-serve, ask questions, get and give answers, and share their knowledge with others, all while recommending your brand to their friends and co-workers along the way. This is how branded communities are built, and soon, a trusted group of contributors, advisers, and experts form, mixed in with prospects, question-askers, and newbies alike. The perfect storm for a successful discussion forum or question and answer forum that creates big value for your brand.
The more useful your discussion forums and question and answer forums are, the more pages a user is likely to want to view across your website, which equals more time spent on site.
When more users want to browse through your website and spend more time on it, you’re creating an environment that’s more likely to drive sales. Discussion forums and question and answer forums are often a point of entry to a website from search engines, as they create useful answers to query-driven searches either about your product/brand, your service, or your industry. When you tie this in with the ability to drive sales through clever calls-to-action, you have a community forum that doubles as a conversion-driving machine.
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