Case study: Use of discussion boards in the Popular Culture, Media and Society module

Department of Sociology
David Beer

David Beer shares his experiences of using discussion boards in a regular pattern of activities triggered by online videos posing a key question related to weekly lectures. This facilitated contributions from many students who were less likely to contribute to in-person / synchronous sessions and provided a useful entry point for approaching challenging key concepts within the module.

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Transcript

This is Lilian Soon interviewing Dave Beer from Sociology about his use of discussion boards with students during lockdown. Did he have any success?

So, Dave, could you start by telling us what you do?

So I teach on in the areas of technology, culture and media; how they shape society in everyday life. And I predominantly teach a second year module called Popular Culture, Media and Society. And I run three Masters programmes in the field of social media and deliver a module on there called Social Media Data and Society.

Out of all the possible interaction tools, why discussion boards?

So, yeah, it's kind of it's got this sort of slightly retro feel, so I kind of thought, well, that's that's okay, I can kind of work with the aesthetic, you know. It was easy to embed in the module itself then because I knew everything was going through the VLE. So I was I was looking for simplicity.

Okay, so what was your approach to designing a discussion activity into the module and how did you get your students into using a discussion board?

Probably three steps I think, Lilian. The first one was the nature of it. Well, the obvious thing before that actually is just to make it very, very easy to navigate, so try to have a very clean VLE module site with as little as possible on it in terms of like nothing extraneous, you know, that was the starting point. So the students can navigate and then simply to construct a very, very neat looking discussion board that had a thread for each week effectively, so it's like a weekly. So what I thought is the best thing to do here is to try to get some routine going about the role of the discussion board. So the way I did that, built that sort of routine in, was the first thing was the nature of the tasks, so it was trying to find a task that was a kind of foundational task for the week's content, which we still have a separate seminar task most weeks, which is a slightly more developed task and leads to interaction. What I did with the discussion board task is try to find something that was like almost like a first step or something that was like in between that would help them to get to that stage or help them to understand the reading or help them to understand the lecture. So it was almost like a little active step that they would take. So I kept the tasks quite basic and foundational and also made sure that they weren't very time consuming, so the students could do them relatively easily because I didn't want to add huge amount of time commitments in. Because my existing experience and the like was that this actually the materials we were giving them were probably quite time consuming. So this was like something to help them feel like they're part of a community of learners that was relatively straightforward for them to engage with. And the other thing was the students are a little bit nervous because they are posting in front of their peers, because all I did was I put a task and then I told them what to do, hit reply here and just put your reply underneath. So they're all replying to me so the students can see each other's response. Deliberately because you want to, the idea is, it's the foundation that builds knowledge amongst that group of people. So some students might just look through the answers, they might not post themselves, and then they might start to build confidence and join in. So the first step is the type of task: simple, straightforward, not massively time consuming; maybe something that gets them to find a fact or a bit of important nugget of information relating to a topic and maybe offering a sentence or two as to why they picked it. It was that kind of a format. So the types of things would be maybe like find the definition of this, and then sort of challenge them, so can you find different definitions, so they then could see what other people had put. And that would work if it was like something that was a bit contentious as to what it might mean, and people could search and find things, or get them to put a moment of historical significance and explain why they picked it, or get them to reflect on something of their own media use and bring it in. And so, for example, we were doing a week on archiving and social media, so it's about the way social media content connects together. So the simple task there for the discussion board was to bring a hashtag in and explain why you think it's important in a couple of sentences. Or on another one was like we were looking at how the data assemblage has built around us in terms of data harvesting. So I got them to pick an app or a social media platform, say when it had launched and explain why they thought it mattered, so together we built a kind of historical story. So they're little task like that, so that's the first thing: the tasks.

The second thing was I responded to all of the posts or my colleague did who I was working with the module on if it was their week for lectures, and on my own module I started off responding to all of them as soon as I could so that each student had a response where I'd pick out something that I identified or start to point towards common themes that were coming out across the work or, you know, encouraging them if they'd found something interesting or if they'd used a bit of literature or identified something that was was clearly important. So there was an element of feedback, an element of narrating just to keep the content going. So I'd often post two, three or four sentences back to the students. This is, of course, time consuming thought that's the issue. So this gave a sense of being an active community with me amongst it. Because I've done this on two modules and my colleague would be responding or one of us would be engaging with the students all the time, and so there's a sense of it's active. I think that the discussion board problem is always one about activity, so if you can keep it active and the students go in and see the numbers showing that there's posts they've not seen and they start saying, actually, there is action here, I'll join in as well sort of thing. So those two things are setting the right task and responding.

But probably the most important thing, I think, is the third thing, which is each week we have an hour is broken into five videos, and what I did was added a sixth video which I would insert usually between the fourth and fifth lectures, so we've got these series of short videos that make up that week's content, I would add a video in there and it would just be a face to camera video of me saying something along the lines of, you know, right, stop what you doing now, what I want you to do is go with the discussion board, which you find on the left hand side, click through there, and you see the discussion board task for week six is this and I would verbally explain to them what I want, what the task was, and encourage them to then go over knowing that they're watching the video in the VLE anyway and they're right next to the discussion board. So I give them like a verbal talk through as well which would encourage them as well to have a go and and to explain why we were doing that task a bit and what I wanted them to do. And also there would then be the written instructions on the discussion board as well. So a really simple task introduced as part of the run of lecture content and then with responses to the posts to give them a sense of community and and feedback as we were going. That was the approach.

You mentioned about responding quickly on on the threads, having a lot of social presence on the discussion boards, and there's research that also shows that when a tutor is almost too present that students, instead of responding to each other, wait for the tutor to respond, however it sounds like you weren't expecting too much of students responding to each other.

No, not at all. Yeah, in fact they haven't done. They're encouraged to respond to my original post. They could respond to each other if they wanted to, but the nature of the task where it's my post, they respond and then I'm replying to them, is kind of an engagement with the original poster to centre us both. In terms of kind of being part of it is it becomes a discussion board is a bit easier maybe than some of the other options as well, because the linearity of it means you can kind of go in and you can just keep working down the posts, you've not got it spread in any way. And it's very good if you've got a text based kind of task. I should say that the one that I was sharing with you, that was a master's level module, and I kind of wanted to get the students working a little bit, writing around the thing, I didn't really want a visual engagement particularly with the issues at that point because we were doing that elsewhere. It is very easy to manage the responding to comments on a discussion board, because if you go in, it tells you how many you've not seen, you scroll down and it marks the ones you've not seen, so it's very easy to maintain that level of response. I should say it's probably around about a third of students. The two modules we've used it on one is the second year undergraduate and one is a master's level module, I would say it's probably something like a third or so of the students actually actively use it. And that level continues roughly and it has continued roughly. I mean, we're into week 7 now on the master's module and that's been very active. The problem I had there was actually just keeping up. It's a very large module, I should say that one, so there was a lot of activity, particularly in the early weeks. And now I've got a colleague working with me on that on that aspect of the module; they've taken over that as as part of their teaching workload.

What's the relationship between the discussion boards and the live seminars? In some ways, the discussion board takes on an aspect of the seminar and the discussion, some of the students, I think, have found it more comfortable to engage with the discussion board than they have in the seminar. And I think it's brought some interaction out and some interaction out of the seminar into the VLE space effectively. And so those students are building confidence, I'm sure how that works with them feeding through into the seminar, but it definitely if you get the tasks right, there's definitely evidence in the discussion board itself of a foundational sort of knowledge being built, and interaction from a wider range of students as well, I think.

And finally, Dave, what has the impact been for student learning and what are the future plans?

Particularly the Masters level module where we've had very high levels of activity on there we've not assessed yet so it'd be difficult to know. My impression is it will help and I think as well, the other thing, though, Lillian, is that what it's done is it's created a sense of shared participation in an environment where that's more difficult to achieve, so it's giving them a sense of being part of the module, part of the university. It's giving them a sense that they're engaging with us on an ongoing basis that's more difficult to replicate in a sort of synchronous kind of solely a synchronous kind of way through seminars and the like. So it's kept that ongoing I'm part of this, I think a little bit. So it's got those kind of advantages as well in the learning environment, I think. And it might well be that we'll keep this, I think I might keep this for the Masters programme. I might not keep it for the undergraduate but with the Masters programme it does give us space in which people, international students and you know in a seminar environment where there's a second language, you know, working in a second language is really difficult challenge in Masters level seminars. I think it's a good space in which students can take their time, they can respond at their own at their own pace, they can think it through, they can have the time to interpret what's being asked of them the student. I think that is very inclusive as a teaching tool. And also I think it will help build students' confidence to join in in real time discussions as well. So I think my plan at the moments is probably to try to keep it on the Masters module next year just as a kind of running alongside the the module, when I'm hoping we will be kind of working with them face to face again. Done.