{"id":406,"date":"2023-06-14T07:30:48","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T11:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bsu.edu\/teaching-innovation\/?p=406"},"modified":"2023-06-12T16:45:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T20:45:09","slug":"thinking-outside-the-discussion-board-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bsu.edu\/teaching-innovation\/2023\/06\/14\/thinking-outside-the-discussion-board-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Outside the Discussion Board Box"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learn about an alternative way of using Canvas discussion boards to create resources students can refer back to and use.<\/p>\n

In this post, I outline one of my early struggles with discussion boards and how that struggle led to me wondering how else<\/em> I could use a discussion board to get the biggest pedagogical bang for my buck.<\/p>\n

My Struggle With Discussion Boards\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By now, three years after the pandemic pivot to online, many of us have become more familiar with the uses, benefits, and pitfalls of online discussion boards in our courses. For myself, one of my early frustrations was the difference between my intention behind a discussion board and the actual way it would be used by my learners.<\/p>\n

When I was still new to teaching, I often struggled with discussion boards and the sense that I was getting the full pedagogical benefit of them. It always felt like I created them with the best intentions at heart, excited at the anticipated responses from my students, but those responses and their conversations often fell short of my expectations.<\/p>\n

The proposed value of a discussion board is that students, in responding to one another, get more benefit out of the virtual \u201cconversation\u201d than they would a typical short-answer assignment. Providing students with clear instructions or a structured discussion board model<\/a> can help guide our learners to engage in meaningful dialogue, and, looking back, I can see where these teaching approaches could have improved the brief, lackluster discussion board posts from my students.<\/p>\n

Simply asking students to \u201crespond to two or more of your classmates\u201d wasn\u2019t enough to elicit the kind of value that a discussion board should<\/em> have. Often, I\u2019d be left wondering why I didn\u2019t just make the assignment a simple \u201cwrite a response and submit it to me\u201d assignment. Essentially, I wanted my students to be, as Sarah Ransdell, Jia Borror, and Hui Fang Su put it<\/a>, \u201cactive users<\/em>, not passive watchers<\/em>\u201d (emphasis in original). This led me to considering the question of other, alternative ways to use discussion boards. question of other, alternative ways to use discussion boards.<\/p>\n

Enter the Visual Design Glossary<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When I teach rhetoric and composition, one of the more challenging units is the visual rhetorical analysis unit. In this unit, students analyze the visual rhetoric of an advertisement to determine how that particular ad uses visual elements to persuade. This assignment is often challenging for students because they don\u2019t necessarily have the language for some of the techniques used in visual rhetoric.<\/p>\n

So, to help fill this gap, we spend a day or two covering visual design techniques (e.g., perspective, the rule of thirds, pyramidal composition, text, color, etc.), and we do this by using a discussion board to create a Visual Elements Glossary that they can refer to and use as they complete their own, individual analyses.<\/p>\n

The Set-Up<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The first thing I do for this assignment is create the discussion board and start seven threads (one fully completed example thread and six other threads for individual groups). In the posts used for creating each of these seven threads, I include two common visual design elements. You can see how this looks in the screenshot below.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

The Assignment\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For the assignment, students are divided into six groups, and each group is given two visual design elements. Once they have their elements, the groups have two tasks to accomplish:<\/p>\n