DUELING COLUMN: Discussion boards are irritating

“Discussion boards are supposed to keep students engaged in the material, but it’s just tedious busy work that adds little to nothing to the overall class experience.” | Illustration by Katherine Attaway

Kailey Krantz | Staff Writer

If I have to answer one more discussion board, I’m throwing my laptop out the window.

As an online student, I feel like I’m doing a discussion post every week and I’m getting tired of it.

It’s supposed to keep students engaged in the material they’re learning about, but it is just tedious busy work that adds little to nothing to the overall class experience. 

According to Canvas, discussion posts “allow[s] for interactive communication between two or more people and they can participate in a conversation with an entire class or group.”But it feels as though there is no real discussion being had. 

We just answer a prompt, submit it and hope either a student or your professor will respond to you with constructive feedback.

I also find word counts to be pointless. 

A word count is a minimum word requirement for your response to give a “well-rounded” answer but honestly, anything more than 200 words is excessive.  

Word counts are supposed to give students an idea of how long a response should be, but I catch myself typing unnecessary details to reach that number when it could’ve easily been summarized with fewer words.

It’s not very productive if you end up typing things for the sake of reaching the word count rather than adding a unique perspective to your answer.

And once I get through typing 300 words of what feels like gibberish, there are the peer responses to complete. 

I work fast to complete my assignments early in the week and the majority of discussion posts require peer feedback, but what if there is no peer to respond to?

I’m stuck waiting until midnight before I can respond to my peers to get my full credit— it’s so annoying. 

A good alternative is VoiceThread. I used it for one of my Spanish classes last semester and it’s great for making videos responding to discussion topics. 

Another alternative is Perusall, which lets you actively interact with the document you’re working on through annotations.

Discussion posts are one of the most tedious assignments a majority of students dread to do. There are alternatives available so maybe it is time to make a change.

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