Writing Effective Online Discussion Questions

  by  SMJJP 

As I am venturing more and more into the notion of how to create community in online classes I have been lead down the path to developing weekly discussion boards in each of my online classes.  I have often wondered what it would take to keep students on track with their online courses.  It seems that no matter how clear I am on due dates, I inevitably get almost half of the class behind by the time we are a month and a half though.  I have recently joined a PLC group with my school to try and see how we can improve student success online.  As we are reading more literature on the subject an emergent theme of class participation comes up.  My answer to class participation has been to create a weekly discussion board in each of my classes with the hope that if the students have to log in at least twice weekly to participate in the discussion forums (they are only open for one week), then perhaps they won't forget that they are enrolled in a distance learning course and they will feel more engaged in the learning process.  So far it seems to be working quite well but there are certainly some discussion board that generate much more participation than others.

Since I don't think we are born with the ability to instantly create good online discussion questions I turned to an article that I first found sited in the Chinook Cyber School blog.  The article is by Lynn Akin and Diane Neal called CREST+Model:  Effective Online Discussion Questions
They use the acronym CREST to outline effective strategies for creating online discussions:

• C: Cognitive Nature- Do you want the students to be able to relate the material back to their lives?  Do you want to get to the higher level thinking questions as in Bloom Taxonomy? Do you want them to construct their own meaning of the content (constructivism)?  Are you trying to build community?
• R: Reading Base- Is your question going to be textbook based, literature based, or non literature based.
• E: Experiential Element- Try to make your questions relate to the students live and experience.
• S: Style of Question- Will you have students working in pairs to answer the questions or will you assign students a role in the discussion board?
• T:Type of Question- Will your question be metacognitive, follow up, student created, evaluation and reflection, or hypothetical questions?

I think this is a great start to looking at effective online questions.  Right now I am just shooting in the dark with the questions that I ask in my discussion board.  I have learned that asking questions that require everyone to answer the the question the same do not generate a tone of participation where as the controversial questions with no right or wrong answers tend to get a lot of participation, although they need the most moderation to make sure that they don't get out of hand.

Another tip that was suggested in this article and also in this video from Simple K12 about how to engage students online is that you need to be clear about the expectations from the start.  Do you want your students to have a 150 word response, well you had better let them know.  Do they need to respond to others posts, and how long do the responses have to be?  Those questions all need to be dealt with at the beginning of a discussion board, likely done at the beginning of the course and set clear start and end dates for the discussion board. 

Some of the expectations that I have for the students responses uses the SEE acronym:

S: Statement- State your response
E: Example-  Give an example to support your statement.
E: Explain- Explain how your example supports your statement

Please add suggestions or tips that you have for creating a good discussion board  or any other frustrations that you are having with discussion boards.