Talk about talk: are discussion forums worth the effort?

Paul Maharg and Patricia McKellar, Glasgow Graduate School of Law

Presentation at Vocational Teachers Forum III, 10 January 2004

Paul and Patricia’s presentation at the third Vocational Teachers Forum discussed the use of discussion forums, how we can best use them, and some examples of their use.

One of the essential first steps in using a discussion forum is to be clear about its function and aim, and to state this at the outset so that students know what it’s for. Examples of forum purposes include:

• provision of ‘how-to’ information about basic learning issues
• discussion of issues arising from tutorials or workshops
• preview of issues to be raised in tutorial discussions
• newsgroup-style discussion groups
• general-issue tutorial support groups

Forum ‘hosts’ or facilitators require little in the way of technical skills, but in general staff do need to be able to:

• keyboard reasonably efficiently
• use features of discussion forum software, for example the use of threads, folders or alerting functions
• know about the security features surrounding the forum (for example password use), and the back-up procedures used by technical support staff
• know of other relevant information, for example links or assessment information, sited on the virtual learning environment (VLE) and that students might ask about

More important are what might loosely be called the interpersonal skills of facilitators, which include (in no particular order, and the categories are by no means closed!):

• enthusiasm
• wit – or at least a sense of humour
• communication without ambiguity: simplicity, clarity, sensitive directness
• setting, and knowing when to enforce, forum guidelines
• empathy with learners and their problems (for example with some aspect of the topic, personal difficulties [offline, obviously], wrestling with IT, or sometimes all of these at once)
• consistent presence (but see next point)
• prudence not to commit to a workload they can’t sustain
• ability to persuade learners to contribute, stimulate them, and to help them reflect on contributions

During the presentation we gave examples of three different types of forums, including ones that supported an undergraduate simulation project in civil procedure, a postgraduate simulation in personal injury and a staff development seminar on ICT. We gave examples from the forum of what we had discussed earlier in the presentation. For instance, the staff seminar forum was kicked off by Maharg proposing quite the wrong questions, because he had misinterpreted the needs of the forum audience. In spite of this the forum went quite well – it may have been that people felt easier about contributing to the forum precisely because there is nothing that facilitates quite so much as a rueful online confession from the facilitator…

In their ways, all three forums demonstrated how refreshingly different forums can be in tone and content, and how, when successful, they can be engaging and even addictive for those taking part. Obviously the situation of forum members is crucial – all other things being equal, part time students on the whole tend to use forums more than full time students. But these forums also demonstrated how useful a discussion forum can be to support the varieties of learning of members on the forum.

There were general learning points that we took from our experiences of running these and similar forums over a period of six years:

1. Discussion forums can be viewed as, in the words of Neil Mercer, ‘long conversations’ (Mercer, 1995). They are so because they take place in slow motion as it were, over a period of time; and the extended time spans can make of them something much more reflective than real conversations, if only because real conversations occur in real time, and we cannot stop the video to rewind. On forum discussions, we can take time out, return to the content that is fixed in pixels, give considered replies, and the like. And unlike real conversations, discussion contents do not shift in our minds with each remembering or re-telling – this is both useful for, and inhibitory to, many discussants. One of the skills of being a facilitator is knowing when to sharpen another’s point, or when to smooth or round it off.
2. Cues are even more important online than they are in conversation, because there’s no eye contact and there are no facial or other gestures. Good discussants learn quickly that tone of voice in a discussion can be signalled by formal or informal syntax, word choice, register, etc. Such discussants appear to be more adept on a forum – whether they have useful things to say is another matter…
3. Turn-taking rules are present, but they’re different from real conversations. Turn-taking is easy where two discussants take the foreground on a forum, but where more than two discuss, the thread can easily become confused. In those situations, facilitators need to be able to discriminate creatively anarchic conversations from confused babble of the sort one might get on the Today programme with two politicians, a civil servant, John Humphreys in the studio and Andrew Marr in the radio car all trying to talk at once.
4. Alternatively, silence can be OK, as it can be in conversation. It can be a sign that support for a particular aspect of a course is unnecessary. But if you feel that the silence is wrong (for example from other bits of feedback on the course), then think about what might have gone wrong with the way the forum was signalled (do they know about it? Are they too apprehensive?) or labelled to the class (is it seen to be for ‘remediation’ only?), or structured by the facilitator (does it come too soon in a course? Is the discussion need fulfilled entirely by f2f tutorials so that the forum is redundant?).
5. Conversational ellipsis – sliding away from the topic – is more dangerous online than in real conversations, because it can be difficult to get back to the topic. Sometimes the facilitator’s equivalent of clearing one’s throat is required – “could I remind everyone that this week’s topic is…”
   Real conversations can sometimes be too convergent – everyone agrees with each other, so that there’s not much to talk about. Or they can be stimulated by someone making a declaratory statement that stimulates further discussion. The same is true of a forum. A forum full of convergers is tedious after a short while. On the other hand, a forum full of declarators makes for a jumpy, nervous style of discussion – sometimes shallow, too, because the declarative points don’t bear much relation to each other, or they come too thick and fast. On occasion, an entire forum can be irritated, as people are in real conversations, by the use of aggressive statements. This is where the ever-tactful facilitator becomes essential to the forum.
6. Discussion is not necessarily learning, any more than talk amongst students is evidence of collaboration in learning. Talk becomes learning on a forum when students discover something they did not previously know or understand, or make connections they had not previously considered; or where doubts are cleared up or a previous understanding confirmed. In this sense, the analogy between talk as collaboration and talk on a discussion forum may be quite close. Where a scenario or a forum is set up for collaborative learning so that students require to think and plan in some depth; where it is well supported by other aspects of their learning; and where they have freedom for options, then the students who do most planning and discussion tend to be the most successful (Barbieri & Light, 1992; Light et al 1994)
7. On the other hand, many students on discussion forums learn significantly by being ‘vicarious learners’ by lurking, listening, thinking and planning offline (McKendree). This is a legitimate form of learning – but a forum of lurkers is not going to have all that much to say…

Finally, amongst the many resources now available for facilitators, we highlighted the excellent work of:

1. Zane L Berge – The role of the online instructor/faciliator
2. Gilly Salmon – The five step model
3. Certified e-learning Professional (CeLP) Programme – for competency frameworks for virtual trainers, tutors and developers (since January 2006, this has been integrated into the TAP framework)
4. the LTSN Generic Centre’s LEAP case studies on collaborating with communities – and of especial interest to law teachers, Ronan Deazley’s very helpful piece, Biting the bulletin: embedding a culture of online learning in law

with the proviso that all guidelines offered above need to be adapted to local circumstances. The early steps of Salmon’s five step model, for instance, were not appropriate to a postgraduate audience.

Finally – and to answer our question retrospectively, since on the day we had to rush for our planes back up north and didn’t quite finish with the flourish we planned, but then who does… – we believe that discussion forums are well worth the effort. Moreover, they can be used to particular effect on professional educational courses precisely because they are so adaptable for a range of communications and purposes – they can support quite complex strings of argument or simple ‘how-to’ questions and answers – and styles of learning.

References

• Mercer N (1995) The guided construction of knowledge: talk amongst teachers and learners Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
• Barbieri M and Light P (1992) “Interaction, gender and performance on a computer-based task” Learning and Instruction 2 199-213
• Light P et al (1994) “Social and communicative processes in computer-based problem-solving” European Journal of Psychology of Education 9(2) 93-110
• McKendree J (n.d.) Research page Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Human Communications Research Centre

Last Modified: 4 June 2010