Fostering communication among students is important because it allows you to reproduce any collaboration you build into your course and maintains a sense of community that can help keep students motivated to participate and learn. It helps if you already had some sort of student-to-student online activity since students will be used to both the process and the tool.
Blackboard Learn Discussions allow you to pose questions and invite students to respond. Discussion Forms allow asynchronous interactions to occur over extended periods of time. This allows for more flexibility when you can’t meet face to face with your students and a good way to encourage students to think critically about your coursework and interact with each others’ ideas.
Create questions and prompts that require complex thinking and application of ideas to avoid repetitive student responses
Be present in the discussion board by providing feedback and coaching to student responses.
To promote originality, creativity, and a variety of responses, you can choose Participants must create a thread to view other threads in this forum, which is the post first setting. Students must respond before they can read their classmates' posts. In Standard View, everyone can see all previously created threads in the forum.
Communicate clear guidelines in the prompt that establish your expectations for students’ contributions to the discussion.
Grades can be based on student participation, on the quality of their posts, or a combination of the two. Each student's posts (including original posts and replies to others) are displayed for easy review.
