What has been most challenging in my own experience working with discussion boards in online courses is allowing the discussions to develop and providing students time to respond before intervening. In the f2f classroom, students almost naturally await the response of the instructor, gauging both her approval and disapproval and often making decisions about how, when, and if to respond based upon what they observe.
Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Selfe “argue that these computer conferences are powerful non-traditional learning forums for students not simply because they allow another opportunity for collaboration and dialogue [. . .] but also because they encourage students to resist, dissent, and explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in learning and thinking” (p. 849). As instructors, we often attempt to mediate the discussion or to clarify students’ f2f responses without realizing that we may silence other students. The challenge, of course, is that time becomes a factor in classroom discussions, and we may look for an opportunity to conclude or to bring the discussion to some resolution before ending class.
Online, however, time becomes an instructor’s and a student’s ally, both for considering initial responses to a prompt and for generating follow-up to peers’ comments. In their course feedback, students reveal that they appreciate and benefit from my responses to their posts, yet I also have discovered that students are willing to and very capable of continuing many of these discussions without my input or my attempts to calm the choppy waters. It is in those instances that we may allow students to grow as writers and thinkers, to enact a civic discourse, and to begin to generate knowledge while solving problems.