Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals

1. Making Blackboard Discussion Boards Work for Students' Intellectual and Social Goals Diane Lemonnier Schallert Dept. of Educational Psychology dschallert@mail.utexas.edu

2. Outline of my 15-minutes • Setting the stage • What, why, and how to use Blackboard discussion board • Assessment and Learning or Learning and Assessment • The philosophical dilemma • 3 Ways I have found I COULD assess learning through online discussion

3. Why use online discussion? • Invariably makes participation more shared • Allows everyone to benefit from the wisdom of the less talkative students • Allows a teacher to know HOW students are understanding a construct • Allows all to enjoy course content in a different (more creative?) way

4. What and How I use BB • I use the Discussion Board function of BB • I replace a class meeting with online discussion • I assign students to groups of 8-10 (no more than 4 groups per class) • I give a starter comment but make it different in each group and encourage students to read and choose to comment on whatever they want • I have a minimum assignment of 3 comments in a 36- or 48-hour period

5. Learning and Assessment • What does it mean to learn from being in a conversation with someone? • One’s ideas are made clearer, one’s ideas are changed by rubbing up against another’s, learning is made more fun • How can one know that learning has taken place? • Brilliant talk that sparkles but is not a reflection of on-the-spot learning • But it DOES happen that students learn from LISTENING to (or reading) talk • AND, it happens that students learn from making explicit their ideas, making them “come out of the fog”

6. 3 Ways to Foster Good Things and Assess them with Blackboard Discussions • Important to set the tone and take the right stance as the leader of the “chat” • Make it important to re-read the transcript of the discussion afterwards • Consider using discussion as the actual evaluation (test) of learning

7. 1. Tone and stance influence learning • Students CAN easily avoid learning from written discussion • Teacher CAN easily influence whether students learn from discussion • Don’t be punitive • Encourage but don’t shy away from pointing misunderstandings • Stay in there a LOT!

8. 2. Re-reading of discussion leads to learning • Encourage students to re-read discussion once it’s over by asking questions on next exam • Bring in comments from the discussion to next face-to-face meeting

9. 3. Use discussion as test answers • Because each posting from a student can be seen as an essay, you could use their discussion with each other AS the actual test response but one produced collaboratively • I would suggest giving a group grade, • grading each conversation wholistically, • and grading it at the END of discussion