Although there are many documented advantages of learning online, some educators still question this innovative way of teaching because of technical obstacles, because they suspect or doubt its effectiveness, or because they are unfamiliar with the approach. Indeed, the teaching considerations for an online course, versus a traditional in-residence-based course, do change by necessity because of the different learning environments.
Making traditional course material digital, converting lectures to streaming video, and assigning tests or writing assignments online are not enough to convert the full classroom experience into a virtual one.
What is lacking in the virtual setting is the dynamic interchange among students and instructors. Although their concerns are valid, in-residence educators should find solace in learning that one of the most fundamental forms of teaching, the student-peer discussion facilitated by a knowledgeable instructor, remains as valid for mature-student distance learning today as it was for Socrates. This venerable method remains effective for online students for the same reasons it works in the classroom — because the discourse among students actually builds knowledge and keeps learning focused on their needs. Online, this Socratic method of teaching, also known as a “threaded discussion” or a “forum,” is an excellent distancelearning tool. All online instructors should consider using this method.
Threaded discussions offer a means to replicate inresidence learning online. They offer advantages over classroom exchanges, and these offset the disadvantages involved with using threaded discussions. In this article, I’ll explain what threaded discussions are and review the advantages and disadvantages of including them in an online course. I’ll also introduce several ways of incorporating them, including some considerations and potential problems associated with developing and using this effective teaching method. By the end of this article, instructors contemplating use of a threaded discussion should better understand this teaching technique, and decide whether it would be advantageous in their online course.
Threaded discussion concept overview
In the instructional context here, a threaded discussion is an online, asynchronous, faculty-led, student exchange. “Online” means that a threaded discussion supports a developed, integrated course that is easily accessible through the Internet or another distributed delivery platform (such as a school’s learning management system, e.g. Blackboard). “Online” also implies that a forum is near real-time in its participants’ interactions, so that threaded discussion postings can be as immediate as verbal discussions are in a classroom. “Asynchronous” means that although the inputs are posted near real-time, the distribution of the students’ availability spreads out their interactions over time, but cumulatively builds on each other even if their inputs are not always sequential. “Faculty-led” threaded discussions are similar to Socratic instruction in-residence, where planning and facilitation yield the best discussions.
Specific instructor tasks include designating lesson objectives, assigning study materials, proposing provocative questions or tasks to stimulate interaction, monitoring or intervening to ensure the discussion remains within expectations, and rendering discussion summaries and evaluations as necessary. The student contribution to the exchange is also similar to that of a traditional in-classroom lesson, where the students conduct the discussion. This means students should prepare beforehand to discuss the topics intelligently, make an effort to participate by directly addressing the questions or tasking, build upon other students’ inputs, further the discussion through reasoned debate, and include relevant personal experience and additional references.
Threaded discussions are more deliberate and insightful than a chat, in which exchanges tend to be fast and shallow. The threaded discussion software reinforces an academic discussion by saving all postings for later review. Threaded discussions are computer assisted, faculty led, student discussions that have much in common with their in-residence Socratic equivalents.
Although there is much in common between online and in-residence discussions, there are significant contextual differences. The high-tech nature of the medium used to communicate online is a significant difference. The software selected for a forum must ensure that participants are able to post inputs easily, reliably, and promptly. There are many commercially available software products for this function. I recommend choosing one based on flexibility and prevailing institution needs.
The threaded discussion facilitator needs to set up a logical pre-planned organization tailored for each discussion. This threaded discussion structure should allow students to easily navigate, participate, and reference items during the discussion. Finally, the facilitator should provide some means for the system to give tips on technical aspects of participating.
Support and a local network server are necessities, in order to deliver the technical focal point for threaded discussions. Alternatively, the institution should contract with a commercial firm to provide hardware, software, and servers, and to modify students’ computers so that they have the minimum requisite software and hardware capabilities to participate. These hardware and software requirements are basic to online education. Cumulatively, this means that between the software, hardware, and set-up, a new distance education instructor needs a support team of technicians to establish and maintain the system, and to train new users. If the support team does not exist, the teacher must be savvy in computers using new powerful software that assists in course development.
Another major difference from in-residence discussions is that the use of the technology alters the nature of student and instructor interactions. Asynchronous threaded discussions alter the time factor. An in-residence discussion on a given topic among students may require two hours. That same number of students might take seven days to complete the discussion asynchronously, as they intersperse their education with their personal and professional lives. The change in the perception of time presents some challenges as it can take 24 hours for all students to initially respond to a question or prompt. Additionally, responses may not be in chronological order as the discussion sequentially builds upon itself.
For example, students may enter the discussion late and want to make a point on a topic after other students have moved on to a new theme. Although this can be annoying face-to-face, when mental recall forces us to concentrate on a few recent points, these asynchronous postings are more acceptable because a written record is available to reference. Instructors, then, need to develop their discussions in a way that supports students who concentrate their participation into one part of the day, while allowing those who participate at short intervals throughout the day or concentrate in a different part of the day to join the discussion. In this way, even though time and technology change the nature of discussions conducted online, the instructor can harness the change to enhance learning, as I will show in the next section.
By their academic nature, threaded discussions are similar to in-residence discussions, and are a useful learning tool within distance education for the same reasons. The technical side of threaded discussions, however, adds complexity to its execution. The need to master and apply software to teach online, or to rely on a support group, complicates distance education. Threaded discussions may also require more organizational planning from an instructor than would be the case in-residence. Conduct of the threaded discussion is more deliberate and diffused due to inherent student schedule differences. A prospective instructor using this method should understand the threaded discussion’s characteristics, and the inherent advantages and disadvantages before adding it to a course.
Types of threaded discussions
Before determining whether to employ threaded discussions as a teaching method, an instructor should understand their characteristics and methods. There are as many ways of running discussions online as there are in-residence. Two methods, “fishbowl forums” and “course-wide forums,” represent two ends of a continuum of possibilities. Most threaded discussions have much in common, so I will present the commonalities first to better explain them as teaching methods.
You will need to settle some administrative considerations before offering any kind of a threaded discussion. The nature of the topic will determine the length of a forum’s duration, but experience suggests that five to ten days is about right. Less than that and it is difficult to develop a topic sufficiently or to ensure that even volunteer students have enough availability to participate. More than that amount of time and students grow weary of the topic and the pace of discussions.
In order to plan their schedule, students appreciate knowing the start and end dates of a threaded discussion. As is done face-to-face, the instructor can terminate discussions early if the students meet the lesson’s objectives, or extend discussions if the students need to do more work. Extend discussions only with students’ consent, however, since students may schedule the rest of their lives’ events around these threaded discussions.
Typically, students feel motivated and have much to contribute to the discussions, but the instructor may choose to evaluate their participation in order to spur performance. This could be a group evaluation, if all worked on a task and grades depend on its end result. Discussion evaluation criteria could include individual assessment based upon the students’ demonstrated knowledge of the subject, ability to interact with other students, creativity, ability to include new material, or a score of other factors. When threaded discussions take the place of a written requirement or test, students generally accept them readily. Students also appreciate personalized constructive feedback that helps them better understand the subject and learn how to improve their performance in future threaded discussions. The written nature of threaded discussions lends itself well to instructional feedback, since students and instructor can review the discussion in detail after the fact.
Organization of the area where students conduct their discussions is also important. A well-organized threaded discussion allows the students to focus on course content instead of the administrative mechanics of the dialogue. With these common characteristics in mind, the two specific types of threaded discussions that I mentioned earlier (“fishbowl forums” and “course-wide forums”) illustrate these learning tools.
Fishbowl forums: overview
Fishbowl forums are online threaded discussions in which select students participate in a discussion and the rest of the class monitors their exchange (or “lurks” outside the discussion looking in). Mature student fishbowl forum participants should be volunteer students. These self-select based on interest and knowledge of the topic, and availability to participate. One distinct advantage of asynchronous distance learning is that participation is on the student’s schedule. Taking volunteers allows those students with the availability and net-connectivity to participate when their schedule allows, and affords other students, who may be traveling, or without net connections for whatever reason, to catch up after the discussion.
Since the number of participants is a subset of the entire group, the subject matter expert facilitates the discussion, keeps the caliber of the exchanges high, and focuses on the teaching points that all of the students need to learn. Fishbowl forums are particularly well suited to courses with a large number of students, since online discussions with over 15 people become unwieldy for students to participate in and for instructors to manage. Fishbowl forums also work well when there are multiple sections of the same course. This concentrates expertise to develop a superior discussion.
The chosen students form the discussion group and initially respond to the facilitator’s posted opening question or task, then quickly transition to discussion or work among themselves. As in-residence, the instructor intervenes to emphasize or summarize points, and to correct or guide the discussion towards its objective. These characteristics of a fishbowl forum make it an effective educational tool. However, there are potential downsides of this form of learning. An instructor needs to understand and address these issues, and convert them to strengths.
Fishbowl forums: downsides
One problem is that most of the student body watches passively from outside the fishbowl forum, and individuals may not monitor the discussion at all. Their main motivation for monitoring is the love of knowledge, and any information they may glean to help themselves academically or professionally.
To encourage non-participating students to monitor the threaded discussion and to learn its lessons, include an incentive within the threaded discussion — some form of immediate relevancy. This might entail a pertinent current event that would generate student curiosity, or some task which the students might soon face in another facet of their lives. Academically, this could include embedding test answers within the forum, or discussing or developing a topic that is similar to one that the monitoring students must complete in the form of a paper or project.
Another method of making the threaded discussion more interactive for all students is to let each participant act as the representative for designated students who are monitoring the forum. You might base such a relationship upon selecting a representative from each section to participate, or you could pair students together. Monitoring students can make suggestions on the course of the discussion, or do supplementary research based on what is transpiring for the principle participant. Each participant leverages the activities of a support group in posting inputs, through pooling the skills and knowledge of a larger group. This further encourages the student-to-student interaction that distance education students often crave, allows the instructor to increase the complexity of a problem, and
reduces the workload through sharing.
Even when pooling participation of a group through a spokesperson, though, the instructor directly observes only the representatives’ activities. To counter this selective evaluation, an instructor can eventually assign all students to act as the participant in one or more of these forums during the length of a course or program. Under this method, every student is a participant, and demonstrates leadership skills as a team chief, organizing the sub-effort, synthesizing information, and persuasively presenting it. Fishbowl forums offer many of the advantages of an in-residence discussion,
but can leverage a greater pool of knowledge and participation with technology in order to improve the discourse.
Course-wide forums: overview
Course-wide forums have the entire enrollment participating, broken into convenient groups, with a separate faculty member monitoring each group. This method has many of the same strengths of the fishbowl forum, but introduces other considerations. If a onesection course is small enough, a course-wide forum operates the same as a fishbowl forum. However, if you need two or more discussion groups in order for all students to participate at one time, then a coursewide forum might be the solution. Course-wide forums are well suited to simulate the interaction between groups or within large processes. This is especially true when students can role-play (e.g. inter-agency processes in government) or when a large variety of specialties must work together to produce a final product. Interaction within and between these groups is part of the learning process. Participation is mandatory in this type of forum, so students may not have as much interest or knowledge of the topic, and they may have conflicts in how much and when they can participate. Instructors in course-wide forums are usually knowledgeable of the subject, but are not experts, and may rely upon a detailed lesson plan, designed by the course director, for planning and conducting their threaded discussions.
Course-wide forums: downsides
The main strength of the course-wide forum is that all students participate, so their learning is active, the instructor can directly evaluate their efforts on a relatively level playing field, and they can simulate complex problems or situations. Course-wide forums, however, require more planning to accommodate more participating groups, a detailed lesson plan that many facilitators can execute, and more resources in terms of recruiting a facilitator for each discussion group, more technical support for problems, etc. As with fishbowl forums, course-wide forums maintain many of the strengths of in-residence discussion but can assemble expertise from around the world to address complex problems or simulate large systems. How far a threaded discussion can go in its content and conduct is only governed by creativity.
Advantages of the threaded discussion
A threaded discussion offers many advantages for distance learning to achieve an interactive exchange among students and instructors. Within the classroom, we expect such an exchange because it is important to ask clarifying questions, to give feedback, to compel students to think critically, and to hone their persuasion skills. For mature-student education, such academic exchanges are particularly fruitful because adult students have more experiences with which to enrich the discussion and enhance learning.
Threaded discussions continue these advantages virtually, and add variety to the program. This variety keeps distance education from becoming monotonous by its reliance on online readings, videos, and evaluated requirements. Most distance education students enjoy interaction with others, and the resulting personal connections enhance their educational experience.
For student evaluations, threaded discussions offer an alternate way to demonstrate knowledge, since not all students do well with tests or writing assignments. Although threaded discussions are also a form of writing, they are a more informal style. Students appreciate the regular feedback from other students and the in-structor, which reassures them that they are contributing to the discussion with their responses, which also provide course modifications — guidance that is lacking in one-shot, all-or-nothing papers and tests.
Threaded discussions also tap different skills, and are thereby an alternate means to demonstrate student mastery of their required knowledge. These reasons — an enriched learning environment, variety, and balanced evaluations — are why discussions are as useful in an online course as an in-residence course, and why instructors should consider their use in distance education.
Beyond the advantages that threaded discussions share with their in-residence counterparts, there are benefits to online discussions that make them appealing, perhaps enough to experiment with a blended or hybrid approach. Because of the distributed nature of students who typically participate online, these discussions de-emphasize rapid response as a factor in discussions. Students have an opportunity to reflect on the conversation and their responses to it, and they can give reasoned and cogent responses. In-residence, there is sometimes a tendency that unless a response comes quickly, participants lose the opportunity to reasonably respond as the discussion marches on. Quick responses are not always the best. Online, it is common for a student to begin a threaded discussion posting with, “I spent last night considering my colleague’s points and I believe ...” Snap answers also favor a few students who have that knack, and tend to leave behind other students who need longer to consider deeper and more thoughtful responses. It is also harder for any one student to dominate a debate online. Asynchronous online discussions lend themselves to giving everyone the opportunity to have their say and to post it. Students cannot be cut out of a conversation unless they allow themselves to be.
Time and limited space pre-determine the amount of references available in a physical classroom to add additional information and sources during the course of a discussion. Since threaded discussions run online, the worldwide Web is available with all of its resources to enhance discussion. Frequently, savvy students will introduce new source documents that clarify points or enhance ideas beyond the assigned materials. Threaded discussions provide a more egalitarian opportunity for students to participate and make all viewpoints known in a more reasoned and open environment, at least for those who avail themselves of this opportunity.
Beyond relaxing the time pressure on discussions and raising the quality of exchange, threaded discussions hold other advantages. Online students can offer today’s personal perspective from their actual location in the thick of events, a dimension not as fresh when students gather in a classroom. Such immediacy can be a disadvantage, too, if students remain too focused on their immediate situation rather than on the larger situation.
Threaded discussions can help the instructor better evaluate how well a student has mastered the course material. They leave a written record, which significantly improves evaluation of student contributions because it can be scrutinized when posted and reexamined afterwards, much like an essay.
The pace of the discussions also allows an instructor to track lesser or non-participation by students during a discussion. The instructor can then work discretely with those students to help them improve their performance while the discussion is still in progress. Students can take that private feedback and actually improve the quantity and quality of their performance over the remainder of the forum. The threaded discussion venue offers an amalgamation of the give and take of an oral discussion, and the deliberation and focus of a written essay. Properly orchestrated, the instructor can encourage the best of both in the threaded discussion.
A threaded discussion can be a very handy tool to use in distance education because it retains many of the advantages typically found in residence courses, and adds other beneficial characteristics. It allows the exchange of ideas, honing of student skills, and the answering of questions online, which is particularly useful to mature students removed from the immediate physical support system of other classmates. Students comment that the added variety of learning and evaluation methods, and simple human interaction, also enhances their education.
To these common strengths, a properly balanced threaded discussion relieves pressure from the tyranny of time, and makes online discourse more egalitarian. Such a discussion results in higher quality through its deliberateness and greater access to references. Feedback to students also improves in terms of its potential to give guidance during the discussion, and the instructor’s option to examine inputs. Used correctly, threaded discussions combine the best found in the oral and written traditions of teaching.
Obstacles to threaded discussion
An observant reader should now realize some of the obstacles that need addressing to ensure a successful threaded discussion. As with any good thing, there is a price to pay for the benefit that comes from threaded discussions. Many of the problems are direct by-products of the good garnered by introducing threaded discussions. All of these problems yield to the right amount of time, resources, or expertise. However, instructors need to be aware of and plan for them to ensure a smooth-flowing threaded discussion.
Technical expertise and support are necessities for a successful threaded discussion. Some experienced instructors may show up in-residence with nothing more than three lines jotted down on a note card and run a memorable lesson with seemingly little effort. There is nothing easy or natural, however, about the structure of an online threaded discussion. The instructor or support personnel need smooth interactive software, reliable hardware, good technical support, and a working knowledge of the host software and its scripting. Freelance distance education courses that are reliable and informative are challenging because they require equal amounts of technical acumen, course material expertise, and expensive equipment.
Beyond the technical hurdle, time is another obstacle to running a good threaded discussion. For a quality informative fishbowl forum, where a subset of students participates for the benefit of many more, an instructor can expect to spend between 50 and 100
hours to initially plan and execute a seven day threaded discussion. That is a lot of work for a small but important part of a course. The author of a coursewide forum can expect to log 60 to 125 hours with the additional instructor training, structuring of the discussion groups, and executing one forum. Each of the additional faculty instructors leading a discussion can benefit from some of the course author’s work, but each can still expect to spend 25 to 50 hours on the discussion. These times include: preparation and some research or self-study; organizing and tailoring the structure of the discussion group; posing questions, monitoring progress, and taking care of administrative work (“my dog ate my mouse, so I couldn’t log on ...”); and evaluations afterwards. The 50-hour time frame is probably what an instructor will encounter when re-using a threaded discussion. It is possible to trade expertise for time, but devoting time is necessary. Spending the effort and building up instructor technical expertise will help smooth the process of developing and running a threaded discussion.
An instructor can also reduce the time necessary to plan and run a threaded discussion with a modicum of organization and planning. Unless the facilitator wishes to monitor the discussions 24 hours a day over the course of a week or more, the discussions must be properly organized and planned so that they run themselves while the instructor attends to other duties (such as sleeping and eating). Because, once launched, a good threaded discussion can become intense, a well thought-out game plan will allow a facilitator to devote attention to immediate activities and problems without forsaking continuity with what is about to come. Threaded discussion students are necessarily more independent and self-reliant.
However with the constraint of time (albeit over the course of a week or more), a poor plan or indecipherable organization will frustrate students and significantly diminish learning, if not bring it entirely to a halt until the situation is rectified. The good news is that a good plan allows an instructor to modify that plan to counter problems as they occur, and to keep pace with the flow of the conversation. Modifying a plan is easier than creating one on the fly, and flexibility is what keeps the discussion relevant and interesting to the students. That might mean changing a planned topic to something that builds on interest from an earlier discussion that still meets the lesson learning objectives. It might also mean including an article from today’s journal that impacts the topic significantly. Whatever reason dictates deviating from the plan, the ability to be flexible is necessary to run threaded discussions successfully. Good organization and flexibility are crucial to successful threaded discussions, and complement the technical aspects, time, and expertise needed.
Student availability is another
obstacle to learning because if the student cannot participate, he or she cannot
learn. The instructor has less control, but is not without some influence over
this problem. In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated some
For these cases, the set period of time over which a threaded discussion runs means that the student’s participation may be insufficient for learning or for an evaluation. For students who have only email connectivity, instructors can download the online discussions from the learning management system, email them to remote students, and load their return responses to keep the students contributing. In other cases when time allowed, instructors have rearranged the sequence of the course so students have time to return or regain connectivity to participate in an assigned group’s threaded discussion. For students simply unable to participate, instructors may assign them a formal written paper to demonstrate mastery of the course material after their return, often linked to the discussions in the missed forum. Lack of student participation may also be due to personal shortcomings — some students simply under-perform.
One advantage of threaded discussions is that the instructor can monitor student progress, and give tailored mid-discussion guidance. Instructors may employ a variety of methods to enable students to rejoin the conversation if they have been temporarily absent or feel unable to contribute meaningfully. These really are no different from what might be used in a resident classroom and include giving an integrated summary of inputs to date, playing devil’s advocate, injecting relevant personal experience, floating a hypothesis for others’ reactions, or citing new evidence from outside sources. Assigning a leadership position to a laggard is another means of getting more participation from an individual, but a risky one depending on why the student is underperforming. To maintain student participation under a variety of conditions, flexibility and creativity are key elements.
Another general observation about threaded discussions is that the first few contributors usually have an easier entry into the discussion than latecomers. In part, this is because instructor questions arrive in discrete and cascading parts, making the first questions easy to answer in order to build later upon the answer, and to lure participation. This seems unfair to some late participating students, and can skew the conversation unnecessarily by a few individuals. There are methods, however, to ameliorate this.
One way, for instance, is to break up a group of 15 into three groups of five with each group answering the same or parallel questions simultaneously, but in separate discussion areas. The smaller groups mean that each individual has more opportunity to answer, and the differences in the parallel discussions may be instructive when contrasted against each other by the students monitoring, or the participants in the other small groups may critique the discussions after the fact.
A second method, to avoid a stampede of easy answers to an initial question, is to assign facets of a question (principles, characteristics, etc.) to each individual for them to describe and link to the main question. After everyone reports, the group then compares and discusses these individual parts, but there is usually enough depth of material now available for everyone to participate easily.
A third instructor method is to ask multiple-part questions which students can address independently, thereby giving late comers more avenues to examine. The initiating questions from an instructor in a threaded discussion are sometimes a bottleneck. However, the proven methods of using smaller groups to respond to the same question, initially assigning specific facets of a question to each individual, and asking multiple-part questions all serve to fairly spread the opportunity to initially respond, and to ensure better coverage of the course topics.
Another potential student problem is the course software itself. Although I have already noted this, it is important enough to say again — preparation is vital. The student must be comfortable with the threaded discussion software so he or she can concentrate on the discussion and not the delivery of the message. Students need an orientation on using the software, which requires an instructional period, a practice period, and a period of feedback.
The course structure should also be such that the student knows where to go to participate and how to do so. An instructor should have students post an introduction before the threaded discussion starts. In addition to breaking the ice among participants who may not know each other, it also confirms before the discussion starts that the student knows that he or she is participating, where to go, and how to post. If everyone introduces himself or herself, that should only leave course content worries for the instructor, not attendance or software competency issues while the threaded discussion runs. Over the course of a degree program, students should learn these participating skills, and most instructors and seasoned students will not need to address them. However, if this is the first course delivered, then these are important considerations for an instructor.
Conclusion
I have covered some of the basics of threaded discussions for those instructors contemplating their use for the first time. The good news for new instructors is that threaded discussions are similar in intent and content to in-residence methods that employ the discussion method among mature students under the direction and prompting of a facilitator. Although the reasons for using a threaded discussion online are the same as in-residence, there are additional technical, organizational, and time obstacles to address.
Regardless, the advantages of this teaching method, expanding student learning opportunities, more deliberate and egalitarian interactions, timely comments from the field, and a record for later review and evaluation outweigh these obstacles. These strengths combine the best traditions of oral and written learning.
Considerations in developing a threaded discussion are not unlike preparing for an in-residence discussion. Although threaded discussions are probably more time-consuming and technically challenging, they offer options to improve teaching that are not available in the traditional classroom. Fishbowl forums, for instance, allow one expert instructor to teach interactively hundreds online. Course-wide forums simulate complex problems requiring much expertise or specialization to solve, or allow collaboration with other institutions.
The inclusion of threaded discussions, however, presents some obstacles to address. Among these obstacles are required technical expertise and support, time to plan and execute, organizing and planning skills, and student availability and participation. This article is a first-hand account of the use of threaded discussions illustrating some of the lessons that most instructors wish they knew beforehand. These were only some general considerations meant to pique interest and generate conversation with more experienced colleagues, or to research online. Threaded discussions are excellent additions to distance education, and well worth the extra time and effort needed in their pursuit of educational excellence and increased student satisfaction.
