Why Use Blackboard: Discussion Board Forum

When discussing a new text in class, faculty members sometimes begin with a general, "So - what do you think of the reading for today?" kind of question. The goal is to get a sense of how students are responding to the text: what issues are resonating with them, whether they're understanding the content, whether they're significantly misinterpreting aspects of the text, etc. Oftentimes, students react to texts in ways that we would never have anticipated.

One very powerful way to learn how students are engaging with your course materials is to give them an opportunity to discuss the materials at length. The Discussion Board feature of Blackboard provides that opportunity. If you create a Discussion Board forum devoted specifically to the text or a general "Class Discussion" forum with the text as a topic - and if you require students to participate in the forum, make participation part of their grade for the course, and provide guidelines for the expected length and substantiveness of postings - it's very likely that your students will share their opinions about the text, in detailed and illuminating ways.

Blackboard's new Discussion Board groups postings according to threads, with the opening screen for the forum listing all the current threads:

If you then click on the link for one of the threads, you'll see a typical "threaded discussion board" view, with the initial post on the left, and any replies to that post indented:

As you can see in the sample above, students can reply to one another's postings - and you can make it clear to students how important it is for them to respond to one another as part of their grade for the discussion forum. You may find yourself surprised not only by the topics that the students are discussing, but also by the differences between how they respond to the text and how you expected them to respond. Discussions in the Blackboard forum can become material for in-class discussions, allowing you to probe the issues more deeply and/or to discuss misinterpretations (or unusual interpretations) of the text.

For students to participate in the forum, they obviously need to have done the reading for the course. In order to increase the likelihood that students come to your class having done their reading, you can require that postings to the forum occur the night (or a specified time) before the class session, and you can even provide some discussion questions in advance, posted into a Blackboard content area. If you require students to participate in the forum and to respond to one another's postings, you may end up with an extraordinarily lively discussion space that seeds your in-class discussions as well.

For instructions on how to create a Discusion Board Forum in Blackboard, see Creating a Discussion Board Forum.

Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 12, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.