Potential hurdle: No one uses the forum.

Potential hurdle: Answers do not match the question.

Potential hurdle: Contributions make no reference to other students’ input.

Potential hurdle: Late starters feel overwhelmed.

Potential hurdle: No more new ideas after the preliminary contributions.

Potential hurdle: Post written and then gone.

Potential hurdle: Discussion digresses.

Potential hurdle: Lack of clarity.

Potential hurdle: Teacher dominates discussion.

Potential hurdle: Teacher invests a lot of time.

Potential hurdle: No one uses the forum.

Scenario

The teacher has prepared a forum for the students. Days later, still no one has posted anything in the forum.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Establish communication rules (together).
• Preventive: Don’t offer too many communication channels and assignments at the same time.
• Preventive: Explain the forum and functions by sharing your screen during the synchronous course or providing an explanatory video.
• Preventive: Outline the added value and expectations for use.
• Ask the students to use the forum for all questions that you receive from them via email.
• Draw students’ attention to a new forum via a push message (e.g., “Messages” course element in learning platform).
• Ask students to subscribe to the forum.
• Be patient when students don’t post immediately.
• Ask the students why they’re not using the forum and find a solution together.
• Allow the option of “I didn’t understand the question” as a possible answer should this be the case.
• Encourage students to speak up. There aren’t any stupid questions and everyone learns the most from errors.
• Consider setting the forum up so that questions can be asked anonymously.
• Encourage students also to post work in progress and work on it together.
• Start using the forum together during the synchronous course.
• If necessary, set time windows for use.
• Be present in the forum yourself.
• Show your appreciation for existing contributions.
• Establish commitment through concrete assignments and deadlines.
• Take up content from the forum during synchronous sessions and discuss content from synchronous sessions in greater depth in the forum.
• Consider forming smaller groups for discussions.

Potential hurdle: Answers do not match the question.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. After some time, the teacher checks the forum again and finds out that the answers and the discussion do not match the given question.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Ask a second person to check the comprehensibility of your question.
• Preventive: Ensure the length of the question is appropriate. Include all important information and avoid distracting, superfluous information.
• Preventive: Highlight important points in the question visually.
• Preventive: Potentially give an example or framework for the response.
• Preventive: If possible, discuss assignments synchronously.
• Ask how something is meant and redirect the answer if necessary.
• Respond as early as possible so that other students don’t base their responses on this off-topic response. Potentially adjust your own work hours to the announced publication times of the forum or vice versa.
• Distinguish between different kind of errors: If the error is not content related (e. g. student posted in the wrong thread) you could correct it yourself and inform your student about it via private message. Should more students make the same mistake you should also address the subject with the group at a later date.
• Clarify misunderstandings for everyone in a pinned post (to avoid causing offense, blame your own unclear wording for the misunderstanding if necessary).
• Point out any misunderstandings to the person in a very respectful manner. Potentially send a private message to the student and ask them to adjust their post accordingly.

Potential hurdle: Contributions make no reference to other students’ input.

Scenario

The teacher has prepared a forum for students to discuss a given question. A closer look at the responses in the forum reveals that the students have answered the question but failed to refer to the contributions of their fellow students.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Formulate assignments to encourage more than a simple, straightforward collection of ideas. Instead, the question should be open enough to allow room for discussion.
• Preventive: Emphasize (several times) in the assignment that contributions should relate to other students’ input.
• Preventive: Consider setting a special assignment, e.g., students should share their own ideas but also contribute at least 2 posts that develop the contributions of others further.
• Preventive: Specify the Answer—Add—Ask format for contributions.
• Answer a question
• Add your own, further thoughts
• Ask a question yourself
• Preventive: Show the citation function for responses.
• Relate the individual contributions to each other and ask for comments by moderating the discussions and asking follow-up questions.
• Situationally, remind students to refer to each other’s input.
• Get students to contribute their own questions to reduce the teacher-centric emphasis.
• Make clear that disagreements are part of the scientific discourse and do not constitute a devaluation of the person.
• Encourage students to ask in-depth questions about their fellow students’ contributions.
• If all students work at the same time, they also write simultaneously and may be less aware of what their fellow students are writing. Spreading out the work out over a longer period of time can therefore increase the references to other students’ input.

Potential hurdle: Late starters feel overwhelmed.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. Because the work is scheduled asynchronously, some students begin their work considerably later than others. These late starters find that the forum is already full of posts. It’s very demotivating for them to have to read all of the posts before they can join the discussion.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Make the time of publication of the forum transparent.
• Preventive: Potentially limit the number of contributions each student can make.
• Write (or get someone to write) regular summaries of all contributions and highlight these visually, e.g., pin them at the top of the forum. Indicate time of the intermediate summary (e.g., part 1 by date, time). You could also advise when a summary will be posted.
• Ask students who have already discussed the topic at length to produce a verbal summary during the synchronous session to help others who may have joined the course later to find their bearings.
• Set a final summarizing assignment that encourages the students to reflect on and situate their contributions.
• Also see the suggestions for the potential hurdle of a lack of clarity.

Potential hurdle: No more new ideas after the preliminary contributions.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. The first two students have given detailed, comprehensive answers to the question. Other students then find it difficult to provide any meaningful complementary input.

Possible solution(s):

• Limit students to one aspect per contribution in the assignment.
• Emphasize that the contributions of other students can also be discussed and developed further.
• Gradually add more in-depth questions to new discussion threads that can also be used.
• When setting the assignment, ensure that the students first have a think for themselves. This usually leads to more ideas being generated than when they read other students’ contributions first and allow themselves be guided by these.
• Highlight research possibilities.
• Divide up the preparatory resources beforehand so that students’ prior knowledge differs and mutual supplementation is possible.
• Assign different points of view for the discussion or introduce these through in-depth questions.
• Reconsider the requirement that everyone must write something.
• Open several discussion threads in parallel and allow students to choose.
• Similar to in the Delphi method, only make other students’ contributions visible in the second step. Example: All students send their thoughts privately. One student then summarizes these and posts them in the forum as a preliminary contribution. Comments can then be made and discussed in the forum.

Potential hurdle: Post written and then gone.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. In order to ensure active participation, it was specified that each student should contribute at least two posts to the forum. A closer look at the forum reveals the following: many students do not seem to visit the forum again after writing their two contributions. They do not respond to in-depth questions or comments from other students about their posts. So, they appear to miss out entirely on the rest of the discussion.

Possible solution(s):

• Make the goal and benefit of the exchange clear to students.
• Ask the students to subscribe to the forum.
• Announce that more in-depth questions will be added gradually.
• Avoid specifying the number of posts to contribute and instead refer to “active participation in the forum” as an expectation, for example.
• For the next session, ask the students to explain which of their fellow students’ arguments they liked best and why.
• Create incentives such as posting new material to encourage students to check the platform regularly and notice new posts in the forum.

Potential hurdle. Discussion digresses.

Scenario

The teacher has provided a forum for the students to discuss a given question. At the beginning, the students discuss the given question. Then, however, several very lively "side discussions" develop within the discussion topic, which actually have hardly anything to do with the original question. The original question is then barely discussed at all.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Consider the students’ interests from the begining when setting the discussion threads.
• Point this out as moderator and move the post(s) to a separate discussion thread, which can be moderated by the student who introduced the side topic.
• Guide the discussion back to the main topic.
• Ask the students to clarify their post’s relevance to the main question.
• Potentially pursue the students’ interests together (following a vote).
• Potentially close the discussion thread and restart the discussion in a new thread with a more precise question.

Potential hurdle: Lack of clarity.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. The forum has already been used for some time and is filled with posts. Now you can hardly find any content.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: Make guidelines for the structure of the subject line of the contributions.
• Preventive: Ask the students to write one post for each aspect, so that the technical discussion threads correspond to the content threads.
• Preventive: Use the forum description text to communicate the guidelines.
• Set unique titles for discussion threads yourself.
• Relocate posts that are incorrectly located in a thread if necessary.
• Discuss citation and response options in the forum and agree on a consistent approach.
• Explain the display options in the forum, e.g., “one,” “nested,” “flat,” and new posts only” within the learning platform OpenOLAT.
• Clarify the options for highlighting individual posts.
• Reduce the duplication of content through asynchronous writing.
• Close discussions when they have ended (in terms of time).
• Assign different topics to different discussion threads. Potentially close old discussion threads if they lead to new subtopics and only discuss the subtopics in the new discussion threads.
• Potentially set a maximum number of characters per post to train students to get to the point when discussing.
• Assign the summary of discussions as a task for the students, e.g. once per semester. Have summaries published as a pinned post (= sticky).
• Use the “sticky” feature to move important discussion threads to the top of the forum permanently.
• Discuss the clarity of the discussion synchronously and agree jointly on possibilities for optimization.

Potential hurdle: Teacher dominates discussion.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. When reading the posts, you get the impression that the teacher dominates the discussion and the students increasingly withdraw.

Possible solution(s):

• If necessary, hold back a little at the start.
• Leave breaks in between your own participation in the forum.
• As a teacher, mainly contribute with questions rather than statements.
• Limit your responses to situations in which uncertainty and/or misunderstandings arise.
• Wherever possible, don’t evaluate the students’ posts (“good,” “important aspect,” etc.) as this may give the impression that other posts are not as good or important, even if this was not your intention.
• Potentially write collective responses rather than commenting on each step.
• Give the moderation of a discussion to students as an assignment (e.g., to the group presenting on the topic). Remember to provide the group with the rights needed in your learning platform to do this.
• Use questions submitted by students as the basis for the discussion.

Potential hurdle: Teacher invests a lot of time.

Scenario

The teacher has set up a forum for students to discuss a particular question. To ensure that the students do not get the impression that they have been left alone on the learning platform, the teacher regularly checks in, answers questions, and moderates the discussion. In doing so, the teacher invests a lot of time in the forum.

Possible solution(s):

• Preventive: think carefully beforehand about what information is needed and when. If everything is communicated in a timely and comprehensive manner, there are significantly fewer queries that need to be answered.
• Set specific times for your forum moderation and communicate them.
• Agree with students on a “code word to indicate that a response from the teacher is specifically desired at a certain point, and hold back otherwise.
• Give students assignments, such as moderation or summarizing content (don’t overdo it, though).
• Subscribe to the forum yourself so that you don’t constantly have to check for new content.
• Use technical options, such as "show only new posts".
• Move final discussions and put the discussion into a broader picture to synchronous sessions.
• Potentially provide examples for solutions.
• Possibly let students give each other feedback (= peer feedback).
• Set clear communication channels and always answer questions that are of interest to everyone in such a way that everyone can see the answer. Ideally, general questions should only be asked and answered in the forum.