Bb Learn Discussion Boards: Using Single and Multiple Prompts to Promote Engagement

In in-person, remote, and online courses, discussion boards are commonly used to facilitate written discussion among students. But, despite wide use, many students see discussion boards as busy work and not valuable to the larger goals of the course. Designing discussion topics that engage all members of the class can be difficult, especially when the specific prompt does not encourage divergent responses from students.

Single Prompt Discussion Boards

Typically, discussion board assignments are designed with a single prompt, sometimes with multiple parts to generate appropriately thorough responses from students. In this scenario, students all respond to the same prompt and are often asked to respond to their peers’ posts. Single prompt discussions work best when the prompt requires students’ responses to be unique. One example of this involves assigning prompts that ask students to connect a reading to their own experiences. There are a variety of ways to design effective prompts, ranging from beginning of class introductions to peer reviews for an assignment.

Multiple Prompt Discussion Boards

A less common, but still effective approach, includes allowing students to select from multiple prompts for one discussion assignment. Doing this creates a sense of choice for students, which is likely to increase motivation. To do this, the instructor posts multiple prompts that focus on various subtopics in the overarching theme of that week or module. The prompts may present different questions or different learning tasks for students to complete, and the instructor will often set a minimum number of posts/responses for satisfactory participation. There are various strategies to effectively use multiple discussion prompts. For each strategy, the defining feature is that students get to choose what they want to investigate based on what stands out to them the most.

Example 1: Assign students to watch several short videos or read several short articles. Then offer a different prompt for each and let students decide which discussion they want to participate in that week.

Example 2: Provide a number of topics. Assign students to select one of the topics and find, summarize, and share a recent news story about that topic.

By utilizing this technique, we hand students the reigns to their discussion-based learning experience by allowing them to have more input in which parts of the content they want to explore more deeply. They are free to choose the aspects of the topic that appeal most to them—perhaps some aspects are more in-line with their personal goals or interests while others are not. Whatever the case, students get to choose the educational threads they wish to follow and may therefore have an easier time finding relevance and satisfaction in discussing the topic.

Whichever discussion board approach you try (or if you try both), setting clear expectations is key. Students want to know what it looks like to be successful in your classes and you want to be able to recognize successful engagement when you see it (and grade it). Consider using a discussion board rubric that clearly lays out the expectations for the features of a strong initial post, including what characteristics you’re expecting to see in a strong response and what other elements you will focus on when assessing the quality of discussion posts (do you care about writing conventions, for example?). This resource offers sample rubrics for discussion boards.