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Moderation Guidelines for Discussion Forums
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Introduction
Keywords: Vista, Discussion, Forum,
Guidelines, Moderation
This page covers the main aspects of Forum moderation and provides advice for its use as a general teaching tool.
Table of Contents
Factors of success for discussion Forums:- profit not only to the students, but also to the teachers
- Presence of the Moderator/Teacher
- Eventful Start
- Your Moderation
- Instructions you give and Quality You Request from the Students
- Netiquette
- Quality of Your Assignment
- Systematic Integration into the Course
- Regularity
- Prevent straying off subject
- Types of Events, Reducing the Efficiency of Discussions.
- Useful Links
Profit to the teacher
Discussion Forum allow you to
- continue teaching outside the face to face course
- have contact with your students during an illness, while away on a congress, an internship or a holiday.
- profit from a written log letting you research the development of your course later one.
- identify weak points of f-2-f events and correct them in a satisfying way.
- identify and clarify critical or open questions permitting you to collect them later into a FAQ
- split up a discussion shared by the whole audience into several parallel sub-topics, which could be re-united later on
- free teaching time from any unwanted type of discussion for the benefit of activities more in need of your participation.
- inform students about current research results that might not exactly represent official teaching content
- gain time, by moving your consulting time online and thus making your answers accessible to all the students.
Students realize rapidly how import a Forum is to you, the teacher, if they see your regular presence there, if they hear you speak about postings there, or by the activities that you place there. Therefore you should regularly go there and identify the most important postings and draw attention to them, even if you managed to initiate a high quality discussion that seems to run by it-self.
Eventful Start
Try - especially at the beginning - to illicit a maximum of postings. Nothing is more successful as success. You have the following possibilities:
- Interrupt a discussion at an exiting moment during your f-2-f teaching and continue it with an important statement in the Forum.
- Start the Forum during a f-2-f event and have everybody send a posting
- Use the Forum for group dynamics such as warm-ups or get to know each others.
- Answer in person to as many postings as possible
- Require each participant to post at least two messages per
week.
Your students should be informed about what you aim for. Are you more interested into their argumentative abilities, or do you prefer scientific precision? Do you vie for creative diversity or the exact reproduction of the exam knowledge? The type of your moderation should be adapted to your type of Forum and its content.
Concerning open debates: Never let your personal opinion transpire, otherwise many students will no longer see any reason to continue arguing.
Concerning Forums that are initiated by questions: try to formulate them in such a way to preclude 'Yes' or 'No' answers. Try,
- one of the little 'why?', 'how?', 'what?', 'what for?' ... question words.
- to link your question to the personal experience of your students.
- to ask questions that you don't know the answer to.
- to formulate your question not as a statement but as a real question.
- analyze or to reformulate
- to compare or contrast perspectives and opinions
- to use insights or opinions of others to produce convincing arguments
- to analyze how things change through cause and effect or "if - than" statements
- try out "if - than" statements for problem solving in new situations.
- contribute a provocative opinion (that you cite).
- give the devils advocate
Concerning Forums that are task based, such as the collection of exam questions you need to provide precise instructions for the different phases of the task.
Find more details to the moderation of Forums in Vertiefte Auseinandersetzung mit Foren and Réflexions générales sur les Forums.
Instructions and Quality Requests
The quality of students contributions in a Forum depend greatly of the teacher, especially the expectations that you communicate to them. Look at this list of expectations in the Student Guidelines. Draw your students' attention to
- the importance that forums have for their learning.
- the quality improvement that is caused by the fact that they produce short written texts.
Formulate your expectations in Guidelines for your students. Give clear indications concerning the title or the structure of their contribution. Many students are not used to write short and concise articles. Adapt this Netiquette for your participants.
Quality of Your Assignment
You can also use a Forum to organize assignments if these require short texts and you would like them to be red by all the students. Find a list of examples in German or French.
Systematic Integration
Forums can constitute an integrated part of your course, if you
- make them mandatory and carry out important activities of your curriculum there.
- are frequently showing up
- use content from the Forum in your other teaching
Regularity
Forms that do not frequently receive contributions will loose your student's interest rapidly. Add traffic to your Forum by giving it supplementary functions. Besides discussions they can be used - at the beginning of a course - for warm-up and get-to-know-each-other activities. At the end of the semester Forums can help the students prepare for the examination. You can also add specific Forums concerning such areas as technical support, course administration, anonymous feedback, casual exchanges, literature advices, feedback, etc. (which could figure under such metaphoric names such as 'Library', 'Cafe', 'Suggestion Box').
Have confidence in your students and their will to learn efficiently. Therefore keep your regulatory interventions to a strict minimum.
- Give your students guidelines what to do when a discussion strays and how to react productively.
- You might propose that they chose a responsible among them-selves to guide the discussion.
- Provide a supplementary discussion topic to conduct any parallel meta-discussion about the style, efficiency or other comments that would otherwise disturb the main discussion.
- Problem: The titles of the messages are not very pertinent as to their content.
- Problem: Students don't provide arguments but react with values such as. 'I like...', I feel ...'
- Problem: Students react with strong emotions
- Problem: The discussion focus is slipping to side lines of the subject and further on.
- Did the member of your online community had a chance to get to know each others at the start, or were they pushed into the cold water right away? If yes to the latter, than you should consider starting with a warm-up exercise.
- Analyze the way you started the discussion; was it a question or a statement?
- Not all simple statements stimulate discussions. Some type of question only produce 'yes' or 'no' answers.
- Compare with the way you successfully proceed in your face-to-face teaching. Would the way you initiated the online discussion have worked in the f-2-f setting? If not try the successful method of your f-2-f teaching.
- Ask your-self the following question: Am I really interested in what they have to say, or do I ask for something that I know already very well? Most discussions loose their 'Raison d'être', if the students believe that the teacher is not interested.
- Also ask your-self, if the subject is really of interest to the students or if you should not find a better way of linking the subject to your student's experience?
- Your students are perhaps not used to communicate by writing. In that case start of the discussion during a f-2-f class. Interrupt at an interesting point and ask them to continue online even promising to provide a crucial information in the Forum.
- Sometimes a teacher is a little bit overpowering to students without that the teacher realizes that. This can depend on the way your critic is received, or how student perceive your way of giving marks. Find a more positive way of giving critics and declare the Beginners-Forum a evaluation-free zone.
- Find out how good the internet access of your students really is. Sometimes they have quite some stress to organize their access and then their enthusiasm to go into the Forum may suffer.