Reports

Monday August 24 2009

Using On-line Academic Forums

Sophie Ringuet Educational Advisor, Cégep@distance

The Issue
Practical Applications
Useful References
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Practical Applications

Using a forum to motivate students or more specifically to conduct academic activities requires preparation. It also requires communication skills to moderate discussions on the forum to attain desired goals. Once concluded, a summary of your experience is advisable to judge whether you have attained your goals and to analyze improvements in your skill as a moderator. There is no magic formula to make a forum run well, but following are a few suggestions to get your project started on the right foot!

A GUIDE TO USING A FORUM

1. Preparation

Confirming that the forum is the appropriate tool

The choice of a pedagogical tool such as a forum must be made considering among other factors your pedagogical approach and learning goals, your organizational context as well as available technology. You must also take your students' abilities into account as well as your own as the teacher and other factors such as the length of the course. Here are some questions which you should ponder before deciding to incorporate a forum into your course.

Pedagogical Considerations

Is your own pedagogical approach in harmony with a forum's functions? Do you want to encourage communication, discussion and team work?

Why do you want to use a forum? Is there a value to its use in your course? What is it? Will the use of a forum promote your course's learning goals and targeted skills? Will it improve student perseverance and motivation? Will it ease the organization of team work?
Is it the best tool to use? Have you considered its advantages and disadvantages? Are there other communication and collaboration tools that would be more appropriate?

Organizational Considerations

Has your school selected a particular electronic forum to support? Is there an course management system, forum software or other collaborative tool installed which incorporates a forum?

Have you discussed the place of IT and forums within your program? Do other teachers use this tool? Are your students familiar with it?

Technical Considerations

If your school gives technical support for forum software, a course management system or another resource which integrates a forum, does this choice meet your needs? Does it offer the features necessary for the activities that you plan to do?
If you want to use forum software, a course management system or another resource which integrates a forum other than the one supported by your school, are you able to make it work? Is the forum's operation easy to master for yourself and for your students? Are you able to insure the confidentiality of forum content? How will you install it? Is it possible to host the forum on your school's server? Is there a cost to use the forum? Do you have the technical support necessary in case of problems?
Will your students have access to the equipment necessary to use the forum?

Acquiring Technical and Moderation Expertise

Technical and moderation savvy is a must before starting to use a forum. Ideally, your skills need to be updated to the point where you are at ease with the software and can offer basic help to your students as required to access and participate in the forum. You must also be able to efficiently use the moderation features to inspire student participation. Among other requirements, the ability to write succinct yet evocative single-screen messages in clear language, possibly using smileys or other non-verbal cues which respect the netiquette (on-line politeness) can serve as a model to participants.

If you have never participated in a forum and would like some reassurance, Research ‘teaching' or another subject of personal interest on the web and find a forum linked to that subject. There are thousands of web forums on almost any subject imaginable. This experience will demystify the tool and help your mastery of it. You can also consult other resources, some of which are mentioned in the ‘Useful References' of this file. You can also take a continuing education course. Profweb's Professional Development pages can provide a number of interest educational opportunities to learn more about forums.

Planning a Forum

Advance planning helps to ensure the success of your forum. More specifically, the following activities are worth including in your preparations:

Determine the goals and objectives of your forum;

Plan your pedagogical activities;
- Determine which themes, subjects, problems or questions will be discussed as well as which tasks will be assigned using the forum. Ensure that these discussions and tasks are linked to the interests and skills of the students;
- Prepare open-ended questions to re-launch discussions when needed;
- Prepare a resources list (texts, videos, internet links and others) to help students perform activities and animate the forum as required.
- Ensure that the activities planned have a real academic value meaning that they promote student learning and motivation. It is crucial that students are interested and see a real advantage to participating. Credit for participation can in certain cases be pertinent.
- Determine a reasonable length of time for students to accomplish the tasks on the forum and advise them of it.
Divide your forum into different sections;
- By creating different sections in your forum, messages can be filed according to discussion theme or assigned tasks. Evocative titles for each section are helpful as well as clear descriptions of the nature of the messages and discussions that one anticipates being posted within so that students can easily determine where to post their message;
- Make sure that the number of sections is reasonable. Each section must receive a reasonable number of messages to sustain student interest. Conversely, too many messages can also discourage participation. The more participants in a forum, the more divisions required;
- A section for student profiles is often of interest where students can meet and discuss subject outside of the purview of the course.
Plan the evaluation grid for forum activities if there is to be formative or summative evaluation;
Define your role and determine how much time and when you will be moderating. To minimize student frustration, make known your forum visit frequency. The ideal is a daily visit.
Make a list of operating rules and a code of ethics to be respected on the forum. Normally this code deals with both message content and form (message length, title, language quality, capitalization, etc.), pertinence (repetition, quality) and respect (courtesy, privacy, copyright, advertising, etc.). Each moderator will modify these rules according to need. Please consult the ‘Useful References' section for links to websites which can be used as a source of inspiration when formulating the rules on your forum.

2. Moderating the Forum

Once your preparations have been made, it is time to use your talents as a communicator and moderator for your planned activities.

Write a Welcome Message

Before inviting students to participate in your forum, you must post a welcome message. This message will set the tone for posts and motivate students by convincing them of the advantages of participation. Your message should contain the following features:

Teacher introduction and invitation to each student to introduce themselves as well,
Explanation of the raison d'être, goals and importance of the forum (pedagogical value),
Present the subject or subjects under discussion and any tasks to accomplish,
Explain the different sections of the forum,
Clarify how activities on the forum will be evaluated,
Present the operating rules and code of ethics which all participants must respect. The rules must be clear and students must me made to understand that they are obligatory. Students can be asked to signify an engagement to respect the rules,
Explain to students the estimated time that they are to spend on the forum each week,
Explain your role as moderator and the times set aside to read and respond to posts,
Conclude in proposing an unevaluated social activity.

Ensure Student Technical Initiation

Before starting forum moderation, student technical abilities must be ensured. It is therefore necessary to explain the forum's features to them. This can be done by sending an explanation by e-mail along with the invitation to join the forum or during an initiation course in class. Students must also be given time at the beginning of the course to try the forum out to perfect their technical activities.

Begin with a Social Activity

The first activity on the forum must be of a social nature. Each of the participants should be invited to attend to foster social interactions between them. This is an important activity particularly in distance learning situations where students do not know one another because familiarity among participants will make the forum operate more smoothly and aid in reaching objectives. Once this stage has been accomplished, ongoing social interactions should be encouraged in a section devoted to this activity.

Establish your Moderation Style

Once students know how to use the forum and have some social connection, you need to establish your moderation style. You must be sufficiently active to make your presence felt, yet give students as much freedom as possible.

At the beginning of the forum, certain students will be enthusiastic participants whereas others will be insecure and hesitant to post. You need to be sensitive to participants' different attitudes and encourage those who need encouragement by explaining the advantages of using the forum. You should give information about how to make posts effective as required.

Later, as discussions become more assured, your presence should diminish and adapt to the nature of the forum. As participants use the forum and become at ease with its operation, contacts will be established and a sense of responsibility for the operation of the forum will develop among participants. Participants might even come to propose changes in the operation of the forum.

Concretely as forum moderator, you should have the following goals:

Create and maintain a climate that fosters exchange and learning
- By continuously making your presence and interest felt through regular and ideally daily visits and rapid responses to messages and posts,
- By always respecting and enforcing the operating rules and code of ethics to avoid conflict and tension. The moderator must discretely but firmly maintain order using e-mail when required.
- By calming excessively emotional exchanges when necessary,
- By encouraging constructive criticism from students even when it is directed at yourself,
- By adapting to the group and to what goes on in the forum which can imply modifying planned activities to meet the needs and interests of students.
Encourage participation
- By promoting discussion as required through open questions, reformulated posts, problems to solve, hypothetical situations, etc.
- By posting when required to stimulate exchanges and refraining when discussions are animated,
- By using strategies to encourage the participation of timid students such as personal invitations to post by e-mail.
Promote learning
- By encouraging student interaction,
- By verifying that students have understood the subject, problem, question or assignment and that the material of the course is present in discussions,
- By guiding student discussion toward course goals,
- By helping students manage the flow of information to make links between different elements of the course,
- By highlighting certain discussion threads through a change of position or a special icon,
- By reformulating or clarifying certain posts,
- By regularly making a synthesis between posts on the forum and the goals of the course and asking students to do so as well,
- By asking students to explain what they have learned at a given moment,
- By encouraging initiatives and ideas and the pure joy of learning and participating,
- By supporting students in their learning process by activities such as guidance during difficult problems or assignments and
- By evaluating posts and tasks effectively and asking students to correct their errors when required.

3. Evaluating Forum Results

When your forum activities have come to an end, a final evaluation should be done in order to determine its value as a resource for students in their learning goals. This is also an excellent opportunity to evaluate your own moderation for future improvement.

In their Guide d'animation d'un forum de discussion, Christine Hamel and Stéphane Allaire suggest making an evaluation of moderation and student participation. The evaluation on moderation should evaluate whether initial objectives were reached and should be done with participants. Do participants feel that the initial objectives were attained? Were there unforeseen skills acquired? Why did participants post to certain activities and not to others? How could specific activities be improved? The moderator should also evaluate which actions were successful and which could benefit from changes.

CONCLUSION

The electronic discussion forum has great potential to facilitate learning and increase student motivation. The forum can be used to enhance a number of learning activities, many involving communication and collaboration. It's up to the teacher to decide whether the forum is an appropriate response to their particular needs and those of their students.

The forum is accessible for college teachers, students and tutors but cannot function in a vacuum. To stimulate student participation and to meet pedagogical objectives, its operation must be planned and moderated. Pre-testing by beginning with simple activities is advisable. With experience will come more efficient operation resulting in larger projects that are contextually relevant. Using other tools to facilitate learning, collaboration and motivation with the forum is often a winning strategy.

If you want to know more about using a forum in an academic context, consult the ‘Useful References' in this report. If this information is not adequate or if you would like to propose an interesting resource or ask an intriguing question, the comments feature at the end of this report in Profweb is at your disposal.

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Comments by readersReact to this text

Your report has really helped my forum activities

Dear Sophie Ringuet, I read your report over the summer, actually I translated it, and I feel it is important for you to know how impressed I am with the results of putting even simple advice given in this report into action in a forum presented to my own students. 1. I did start with a social activity. Students did feel more relaxed having been 'socially' obligated to post at the beginning of the semester. 2. I made the forum directly linked to an important group project in my course. 3. Students are requested to post work on the forum for grades. 4. I spent a lot of time programming access to different topics for different groups and tailoring permissions so that there was a lot less confusion than on forums I have used in years past. 5. I am extremely aware of my role as a moderator and am present on the forum to get participants over rough spots and dispense information. Thanks to your report, I was able to take a more analytical approach to the forum, and I have been rewarded with almost shockingly enthusiastic participation which I did not have before.

Norman Spatz, teacher, Cégep du Vieux Montréal [2009-9-09]

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