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Steven Gilbert (1995) of the American Association for Higher Education states that
one purpose of educational institutions is to make better connections among people
who want to learn, people who want to teach, and the world of information and
ideas. Electronic discussion forums provide a time-of-convenience and place-of-
convenience opportunity for student-student contact and student-instructor contact.
Discussion forums on the World Wide Web (WWW) are a common space for
sharing opinions, solutions, literary citations, and pointers to sites on the Web--
arguably the most publicized segment of the "world of information and ideas."
A shared space on the Web, the discussion forums provide a common "meeting"
place for participants to contribute information. Content is presented as a collection
of threaded messages with Web interfaces for perusal of existing threads and
submission of new posts. The threaded presentation puts messages on the same
topic together and indicates response messages with indentation, allowing readers
to follow discussions topic by topic.
Since Web pages do not necessarily "deliver" information directly to people, but
instead must be "visited," how do forum participants know when new items have
been added? The discussion forum software has a notification module that delivers,
via e-mail, daily notices of new posts on the individual forums. The notices are brief
messages indicating new posts by subject and author and giving the URL of the
forum, which reminds those receiving the notice how to get to the forum and
provides an active link to those who read e-mail using a Netscape browser.
Instructors, as the "owners" of their forums, have an option in the creation and
maintenance menu to specify e-mail addresses of people to be notified. We
encourage instructors to use their class listserv as the notification list.
Pedagogical Implications
Four examples below are suggestions of how discussion forums fit with learning
theory and teaching methods.
Guest experts. Using a discussion forum for her "Health Care Informatics" class,
Professor Sheila Englebardt of UNC-CH's School of Nursing offered her Informatics
students access to experts in the major topics to be covered. These guests
participated remotely from a variety of places around the world; from Indian Rocks
Beach, Florida to Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. Presiding over the
discussion for a topic's time frame, each guest introduced the topic, posed questions
to the class, responded to comments and questions, and provided pointers to
additional background reading. Through WWW discussion forums, students in this
class had the opportunity to discuss topics with 13 guest experts, providing students
and instructor an enhanced learning experience.
World wide sharing. Shortly into the semester, a health care Informatics class at
Washington State University joined the forum. Without modification to the existing
forum and with no noticeable degradation in service, this second class participated
from 3000 miles away--with access to the same experts, with ability to reference and
contribute to the shared knowledge bases, and with an interface already familiar
and available to them--their Web browser of choice.
Concerning use of Perl, even though 5.0 manuals were not yet available in print,
students readily adopted the discussion forum as a common space for sharing
useful Perl 5.0 resources found on the Web, essentially creating their own Perl
reference manual, to be referred to throughout the semester.
Concerning system design, students again turned to the WWW discussion forum.
They were able to post their ideas accompanied by flow diagrams, thereby
presenting an illustrated argument. In addition, students included citations and
URLs of other approaches to designing such systems, analysis of those models, and
speculation of how those approaches could benefit or limit the system they were
designing.
Issues of use support. All instructors, whether actively using discussion forums or
considering use, need support. The "innovators" and "early adopters" (Rogers, 1995)
seek information regarding the extended potential of the technology: Is it extensible
to include more advanced features? Is it customizable? These instructors tend to
generate new ideas for applying the technology and for enhancing the learning
experience for their students. It is essential to work closely with these instructors to
help them explore new applications and, perhaps more important, to learn from
them.
It is just as important to support the "early majority" and "late majority" who have
seen others implement technology in instruction and are ready to attempt
incorporation of the technology in their teaching. There is, perhaps, nothing more
frustrating to faculty than to watch a technologist give a flashy demonstration of
how technology can enhance their teaching, get excited to use the technology, and
then find no assistance to pursue that use.
The Academic Technology and Networks unit at UNC-CH has a structure designed
to support both groups. A program called Simple Start introduces Internet
technologies to instructors via training classes, technology demonstrations,
workshops, and individual consulting. Simple Start focuses on simple yet powerful
tools such as e-mail, listservers, the World Wide Web, and discussion forums.
Working in collaboration with Simple Start, a research and evaluation team tracks
new developments in instructional technologies, consults with the innovators and
early adopters, and evaluates and demonstrates tools that have potential in that
environment. Appropriate new tools and effective implementations are added to the
Simple Start tool set for use by the larger group.
Encouraging use. Forced participation is certainly appropriate and perhaps the most
effective approach in some situations. Ideally, though, if learning is the primary
objective, then forced use seems less appealing. Any tool will be readily used when
that tool provides an advantage--in this case, an aid in learning. Participants will
use a discussion forum when it becomes a valuable information resource and an
effective communications tool for linking students to instructors, students to
students, and instructors to instructors. In this light, instructors are encouraged to
plan their use of forums, to keep the discussions focused, and to promote sharing
information via URLs, citations, and uploaded documents.
The discussion forum software itself promotes use of the forums by delivering
notices after new information has been added. Once a day, a brief, gentle reminder
is sent via e-mail to addresses designated by the instructor. These notices include
the name of the forum, a list of new posts by title and author, and the URL of the
forum to make the return trip easy. The notification feature was added after
evaluation of early forums indicated a problem of knowing when to visit a forum. It
takes only a few visits to an inactive forum before people decide not to come back.
The notices circumvent unnecessary visits.
Lessons Learned
Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned in our discussion forum project is to keep
the tool as simple to use as possible. The few options of the forums are available via
menus and fill-in-the-blank forms. While there may be other ways of doing things
behind the scenes, it seems unwise to introduce those complexities. The forums do
one thing--provide a common, shared discussion space--and they do it well.
Where appropriate, we encourage integration of other tools with the forums. For
instance, we suggest that forum notices be sent to established class listservers. The
listserver software has been tested and has proven effective for delivering e-mail to
groups; no reason to reinvent that feature in discussion forums. By integrating with
existing tools, we can focus our development effort on functionality that is not
available and add those modules, tools, as they become robust. From the systems
administrator perspective, problems can be isolated to specific modules making
support easier. From the user perspective, new modules can be added with minimal
interruption.
It is clear that simply making discussion forums available does not result in
effective use. In several cases, forums were created with enthusiasm only to sit idle
due to ineffective moderating by the owner. Presentations not only to faculty
groups, but also to students, plus testimonials from faculty peers are essential in
generating willing and eventually enthusiastic participation.
Conclusion
References
Gilbert, Steven W. (1995) Important questions for higher education: Sex, drugs, rock and
roll, books ... or computers? [On-line]. Available URL: http://www.aahe.org/tltr-
ch1.htm.
Rogers, E.M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.