The strategic
use of forums on
modules and
qualifications
by Mary Thorpe
IET-2014-02 – June 2014
Institute of Educational Technology
“Crowds on 18th Street - 2009 presidential inauguration” by AgnosticPreachersKid
Research
and innovation
report
The Strategic Use of FORUMs on Modules and
Qualifications
1
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of key issues in the use of forums for
online, assessed modules and qualifications. It was produced in 2013 in order to provide
context and guidance for Open University module and qualification teams as they design or
revise their use of forums. During 2013, the Pro Vice Chancellor (LTQ) instigated a review of
forums, on the advice of the Quality Enhancement Advisory Group (QEAG). QEAG was set
up in 2012 in order to review evidence about the student learning experience on OU modules
and qualifications and, if necessary, to make recommendations for specific University-level
quality enhancement activities to improve the student experience. End of Module survey data
together with the first round of reports from IET Data Wranglers during 2012 were used in
overview reports which QEAG discussed at its first two meetings.
Following this discussion, QEAG decided to recommend that module and qualification teams
should review how effectively they are using forums, and make improvements where
necessary. The aim is not to increase usage of the forum tool necessarily, but to make sure
the module has an effective strategy for forum use which is based on its learning outcomes,
and that implementation matches the strategy and achieves its aims. Consideration of
accessibility issues is provided in appendix 1 to this paper and all modules/qualifications may
find it useful to consider whether they have reasonably complied with these issues.
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Why should we review forum strategy and implementation?
The OU has used forums on a large scale since 1988 and some disciplines now have a great
deal of experience in seeing how students and tutors respond to the way forums are set up,
module by module. We do not seem to be drawing on this expertise effectively enough, since
we continue to have open-ended comments over many years from students voicing
dissatisfaction with forums, as well as appreciation for their benefits. We have also had lower
levels of positive feedback about online teaching and support. Forums are also not now the
only tool available to us for tutor and student interaction.
The aim of reviewing forums is to reduce predictable causes of student and tutor
dissatisfaction, which may be traced back to a lack of clarity about why forums should be
used and how to deliver that strategy effectively. Ultimately we hope that student and tutor
feedback becomes more positive in relation to online teaching and support.
Accordingly QEAG asked IET to provide guidance for module and qualification teams, and a
set of key questions/issues for teams to use in reviewing their forum strategy and its
implementation. This is set out below in section 6.
Forums purely for tutors and module team interaction are not included here. Module teams
seem to be using them effectively and they positively support improvement of the module’s
teaching and support.
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Forums – should they play a big role in the teaching or not?
Forums can deliver benefits in two main areas:
•
First, they give students a feeling of studying with others and can help reduce
isolation. Interaction with other students, and with a positive and facilitative tutor, can
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support motivation and keep students studying, especially when things prove
challenging.
•
Second they can deliver specific learning outcomes, such as working in teams,
drawing on the experience of others, demonstrating one can use ICT for learning, and
so on. They can also act in concert with other tools and media in support of learning
outcomes that could be delivered without them – they can be used as a form of
enrichment in other words.
The forum tool is highly amenable to shaping by teachers/teams and thus can be used in
more subtle ways than these generalisations suggest. But it is a helpful place to start because
one of the key decisions to make is about whether forums are purely there for general student
support or are intended to deliver specific learning outcomes which are part of the module
and/or qualification learning outcomes. If the former, then forums would not be expected to
play a big role in the teaching, whereas in the latter case, their role would be bigger and we
might expect more study time to be required.
The role of forums in relation to module/qualification learning outcomes is probably the most
important area for a module team to review – whether or not the strategy for forum usage is
the right one for the module/qualification learning outcomes, in the circumstances of its
students and resources. Having decided on that, the rest is about whether or not the strategy
is effectively communicated and delivered on the ground.
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If it isn’t broken – don’t fix it
Some module teams have already refined their forum strategy and implementation. They may
have spent several years refining a strategy that now works well, in which case no further
review is necessary – provided there are no issues for the qualifications to which they relate.
However, students still tend to give lower ratings for teaching online as opposed to other
areas of their experience. A few modules buck the trend and students can even rate online
more highly than face to face or other areas of the teaching. We need to learn from such
module experience - of all the tools in the VLE, forums have the longest period of usage from
which to learn. They now are not the only tools that can be used to generate interaction
however, so again, we need to be clear what they are for and how we want students to use
them.
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Some general features about forum usage.
Forums are a core teaching tool but overuse, unrealistic or unfocused use costs the
University in terms of both staff and student time, and disappointed students and tutors. The
easy win where forums are concerned is to use them to deliver a form of basic student
support and communication – as outlined above in section 3. You will still need to check out
the implications for accessibility, as outlined in appendix 1 to this paper. Students frequently
report feelings of reduced isolation and of feeling part of the wider student group and the
University, as a result of being able to read other students’ postings and sometimes to make
their own. This can be delivered using a ‘keep it simple’ strategy in terms of the number and
ambition of the forums to be set up.
However, forums can be given a bigger role, as a means of delivering key learning outcomes.
This usually requires much higher inputs of time and activity design from the module
production team, study time from students and moderators/tutor time. Intensive use of forums
may be required and desirable, but it can also bring a down side. Even successful online
interpersonal interaction carries risks for at least some students. These are the risks of
reduced flexibility and vulnerability to the dynamics of groups and the content of contributions
from others, which may dishearten or disappoint. Unfortunately these disbenefits are only too
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easy to generate and a decision to require significant time allocated to forums, and to make
them required, should not be taken lightly.
The forum tool can be adapted to suit the diverse learning needs of very different disciplines
and qualifications. However there are a number of general points which recur in people’s
experience of module forums at the OU, regardless of module differences. These general
pointers are one place to start for most module and qualification teams. There will always be
exceptions to any generalisation but we think that many would agree with these points:
•
Forum participation is highest at the beginning of a module and drops relentlessly
towards the module end; a very big push in terms of designing a mandatory activity
would have to be designed to get a majority of students participating actively at a late
stage in most modules.
•
A majority of students will not actively participate (read and post) in forums beyond
the early study stage unless there is an explicit link to learning outcomes and some
recognition in assessment.
•
Participation in tutor group forums is often low, with a few exceptions where tutors are
highly committed or skilled, unless their purpose and content is designed into the
module materials by the module team and evidence of that is clear on the study
calendar.
•
Forums need a ‘critical mass’ in order to generate enough postings to create a lively
and positive ‘place’ ; tutor groups starting at 20:1 can become too small to generate
the necessary dynamic. Tutor group clusters, or a national/regional forum can be set
up to generate enough activity to create a ‘place’ for interaction that is reliably
responsive and lively, if tutor groups are not proving viable.
•
Successful delivery of anything more than general student support requires module
teams to estimate how much time this might reasonably require from students (as
part of the weekly expectation of study hours) and tutors (as part of the tutorial
allowance).
•
Group ‘personality’ varies unaccountably: the same activity with the same tutor can
succeed one presentation and fail the next: that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a
good activity
•
Forums can be more trouble than they’re worth, but they can also be worth taking the
trouble to make them effective for what you want them to achieve, within your cost
and time parameters
6 A key set of questions to use for review of forum strategy and delivery
A review may be carried out by a module team, a qualification team or both. It may help to
carry out a review using the issues and questions set out below. .
A
Review the context for your own use of forums – consider these issues:
•
•
•
Student population size and orientation to ICT – level of skill, familiarity, enthusiasm
for ICT and forum usage specifically (feedback may provide useful open-ended
comments here)
Module and qualification learning outcomes
Student study time – how many hours directed, how much if any time available for
forum participation, how pressed are students in relation to workload?
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•
•
How much time is allocated for tutorial/tutor support?
How is this allocated across regions/nationally?
B
Review your use of forums and revise it where necessary
You may decide to keep your strategy as is, or you may decide to reduce your expectations
or alternatively, to increase them. The outcome may be little change, modest or even
considerable change, but we hope that improvements are feasible that will feed through into
fewer frustrations and more positive feedback from students and tutors.
A starter list of questions for your review is as follows:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
What is your strategy for how forums are used on your module?
Are students told at the start of their module what this strategy is and what they are
meant to get out of using forums?
Have you addressed accessibility issues such as those outlined in appendix 1 to this
paper?
Is the number/complexity of forums itself off-putting/too time consuming for the
benefits delivered?
If intensive interaction is scheduled at specific times, are students also told about
those time periods, preferably before they register but certainly in the first week of
study?
Are forums located at the right level (tutor group, tutor group cluster/ region or
national module level - in terms of forum size and activity? Will there be enough
students involved to ensure that participation of the kind that you want is
realistic/likely ?
Does your strategy require significant levels of participation by students? If so, have
you worked out an estimated number of hours for student participation, as the
concomitant of achieving the forum purposes that you want?
Are the time estimates for participation realistic and doable at the points where they
are intended to occur?
Are the moderation arrangements in place realistic and communicated? Review in
relation to both ALs and to any moderators of other forums.
Have you reconciled any hours required for ALs to deliver your forum strategy, with
the tuition hours allocated for the module as a whole? (If this raises issues in terms of
regional allocation of tuition budgets, obviously this can only be handled locally and
not through guidance in this context)
You may also find it useful to see comments below on a series of questions raised by the
Faculty of Health and Social Care colleagues in the course of doing their own review of
forums. There are no hard and fast rules for many issues but we offer this as a starter.
Issue
Students encounter wide
variation in quantity, size,
naming and function of forums
on the same qualification.
Welcome forums – should they
stop or continue after the first
few weeks?
Comment
Uniformity of structure and activity is unlikely to meet the
needs of all modules at all levels, but forums with the same
purpose should be given the same name if possible, and
structures generally kept as simple as possible while still
delivering the strategy. Confusion or time wasting for
students, caused purely by our not reviewing the whole
picture from the students’ point of view is always
unsatisfactory. That does not mean that everything has to
be uniform.
The answer to this depends on whether students can be
swiftly moved into forums that continue to offer effective
response. If tutor group forums are not active enough to
constitute a place where students can get responsiveness
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What is the role of tutor group
forums? Guidance given in
different modules varies. How
can participation be
encouraged?
Some modules give marks for
simply participating in forums,
others require participation to
have an outcome and that is
what gets the marks – which is
better?
Should study skills forums be
used across the modules in a
qualification/at different stages
in a degree?
on a regular basis (i.e. get effective support), a cluster or
national forum may be necessary in order to do that. See
S104 case study below, where tutor group forums cluster
together and avoid the risks of operating each in isolation –
this obviates the need for a national forum by creating
viable and active bigger forums where tutors share the
moderation workload.
Tutor group forums do not have purpose built-in; the
module/qualification team needs to decide what their
purpose shall be and communicate that. The in-built drivers
are about size of group and skills of tutors – that may mean
not being too ambitious about what can be achieved in tutor
groups. That is also why some modules use tutor group
clusters or have both tutor groups and a national forum.
There is no need to keep trying to drum up participation
unless that is what the strategy requires – a tutor group
forum could be a fall-back option for those who want to
contact their tutor or who like forums, rather than being
required for all students. It all depends on the strategy and
the module learning outcomes.
On the whole, marks for the outcome of participation works
better in that it emphasises what the point is of spending
study time participating – it is done for a real learning
benefit not simply to make students use a tool. In some
circumstances though, getting students to post in the early
stages, can be helped by giving a few marks, as long as the
intrinsic benefits of participation are the point thereafter. If
forums are not really delivering benefits, allocating marks
may achieve compliance but not student appreciation.
Yes – if the strategy requires it, and if forums are the best
way of delivering/developing those skills, whatever they are.
Remember that forums can be used as part of a linked
series of activities, where independent study activities feed
into forum activities and each reinforces the other – or can
do. See the article on U316 in the references (Thorpe,
2008) for a detailed worked example. Also some of the case
study maps provide thumb nail sketches of similar
approaches.
Mary Thorpe and Linda Norwood, Institute of Educational Technology,
September 2013
REFERENCES to further reports/guidance on forum usage and design
Barnes, F. and Sainsbury, K. (2013) Audit of Online provision (forums, Elluminate and
assessment) on the degrees qualifications for Health and Social Care, Social Work and
Nursing, Available from the authors and the Faculty.
Barnes, F. (2006) http://kn.open.ac.uk/document.cfm?documentid=10957 An account of
activities in 2006 in study skills forums set up for students on KZX100 Understanding Health
and Social Care (accessed from the Knowledge Network 11 September 2013)
http://epd.open.ac.uk/browseLAG.cfm?lagID=7&method=displayLAGDetails Learnabout
Elluminate and Moodle Forums (Accessed 11 September 2013)
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Research and evaluation based on forum usage and experience at the Open University
Coffin, C., Painter, C. & Hewings, A. (2005) Patterns of debate in tertiary level asynchronous
text-based conferencing, International Journal of Educational Research, 43(7-8), 464-480
Goodfellow, R. (2005) Virtuality and the shaping of educational communities, Education,
Communication and Information, vol. 5, no. 2, pp.113-129.
Kan,Q. & McCormick, R. (2012) Building course cohesion: the use of online forums in
distance Chinese language learning, Computer Assisted Language Learning journal
Kear, K. (2004) Peer learning using asynchronous discussion systems in distance education,
Open Learning, vol. 19, no. 2, pp.151-164.
Robinson, D.J. (2011) Collaborative Experiments Online in a Module presented Globally.
BioScience Education, 18
Thorpe, M & Godwin, S. (2006) Interaction and eLearning: the student experience. Studies in
Continuing Education, vol 28 (3), 203-221
Thorpe, M. (2008) Effective online interaction: Mapping course design to bridge from research
to practice, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(1), 57-72. [provides a worked
example of an actual design on U316 The Environmental Web together with qualitative
evidence about why it works and how it works.]
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APPENDIX 1
Forum strategy and implementation: Accessibility
considerations
Produced by the Securing Greater Accessibility (SeGA) Project
Linked from the Accessibility Information for OU staff website
30 April 2012
Note: please refer to this page for updates. Enabling access to forums
The systems used for computer conferencing (forums) can be problematic for disabled
students. The OU’s VLE forums are technically accessible. However,
There are other issues:
• manageability - students may not be able to skim-read to manage the volume of
posts
• accessibility of other students' contributions - non-disabled students need to be
encouraged to follow best practice
• time related - students using assistive technology or students with dyslexia can have
difficulty contributing to synchronous conferencing
Manageability and good practice
Although screen readers can read out lists of forum posts, and posts can be read and sent,
managing forum posts can be a laborious process if a forum, has a lot of traffic. There is also
a usability issue associated with handling a large number of posts in a forum. It is an
extension of the problem faced by anyone trying to follow threads in a busy forum.
•
Students using screen-readers, and to a certain extent those using
magnification software cannot easily skim read subject lines.
Students have to devise strategies to cope with screening posts for those that are most
significant, for example by using the screen reader search tools.
Moderators can help by keeping off-topic posts to a minimum and by encouraging good
practice in postings.
Good practice is particularly important in those forums which are part of the teaching of the
module, even more so if students are assessed on their contributions. Non-disabled students
may not be aware of the need for care in postings and there is a risk that they may be
unwittingly increasing the disadvantage faced by disabled peers.
Students with dyslexia
An article in the Times Higher Education Supplement ("Web-based discussion forums
'marginalise dyslexics'", Jessica Shepherd Published: 07 July 2006) outlines research by
Brian Woodfine and others at Sheffield University which suggests that students with dyslexia
find the text-based elements of on-line communication difficult. (Access to the article requires
an OU Library password, see Information about passwords.) Students with dyslexia may rely
on software to read text aloud and to check spellings. This makes composing posts slow.
Students may also be reluctant to expose their poor spelling to other students. This means
that such students don't contribute as well as they could in a face-to-face settings.
Associate Lecturers can help by being aware that reluctance to contribute may be because of
a disability and by working with individual students to find strategies to manage specific
learning activities in alternative ways.
Good practice for accessible posting
There are two kinds of actions which can make forums more accessible to a wide range of
participants - those which make it easier to manage large numbers of posts and those which
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make it easier to read individual posts. It is unlikely that disabled students will persevere with
reading or contributing to a forum which takes too long to engage with.
Some of the following points are taken from the OU Netiquette guide, some are adapted from
guidelines developed by the OU Disabled Students Group for their own forum.
Making it easier to manage
Managing large numbers of posts, picking out relevant ones and working out how they
relate to each other can be demanding for all students. For those who cannot skim read or
make use of visual clues, it can be very challenging.
Give your posts a descriptive subject line.
• Make it easy for others to decide whether they want open your post.
• If you're contributing to a thread, use the 'reply' function so that posts appear
•
•
in the same thread.
If you're moving away from the subject, start a new thread.
Make the subject lines distinct so that screen reader users can tell quickly that
posts in a list belong to a particular thread.
For example, subject lines: "What is the best way to find out about giraffes?" and "What is the
best way to find out about elephants?" are hard to distinguish without listening to the
whole line to the end - this would be tedious after the first 30 or so posts.
•
•
Send your posts to the right place.
Try to post in the right sections of forums - again this saves time checking
relevance of posts
Making it easier to read
Other students may be using different methods to read posts, e.g. magnified or with different
colour schemes and fonts, using an audio screen reader or a refreshable Braille display.
Remember that you are talking to real people.
• Other people may not be seeing the post the same way as you do.
• If you use colour, fonts or formatting, make sure that there is sufficient colour
•
•
•
•
•
•
contrast
Avoid startling colours such as shocking pink or lime green or flashing text as
these may make cause some people problems.
Make sure that anyone who can't see it and is relying on a screen reader
program can still make sense of the content.
Using quotes
Only repeat what is essential from other people's posts, this will save time
for those who take longer to read and can't see the end of a quote to skip to
it.
Put each quote on a new line and indent it if possible. This will help students
with dyslexia and those using magnification or Braille displays to
follow your posting. It will also improve the phrasing for those using screen
readers.
Unless you need to include the whole of a previous post, summarise or pick
out relevant quotes. This will reduce the amount of time needed to read your
post.
If possible, use correct punctuation.
• This will allow screen reader programs to distinguish between "I'll" and "ill" for
example.
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•
Commas and full stops are used to create voice inflections which make
listening easier and improve comprehension.
Leave a blank line between paragraphs
•
This will help people with dyslexia to follow your arguments. Screen reader
•
•
programs will leave a longer pause which helps comprehension.
If you are using fonts and styling, use a font-size of at least 12 point.
Use a font which is easy to read on screen such as Verdana, Arial or Comic
Sans.
Try to keep your posts short.
• It takes longer to read a post using assistive technology, especially if spelling
•
of unfamiliar words needs to be checked.
Keep to the topic, there is no reason to be excessively formal, but keep the
social chat in the right forum.
Signal your emotions in posts.
• General guidelines encourage you to add symbols or emoticons to posts to
help convey the personal tone. To help screen reader users, use words in
brackets such as <smile> rather than :-), as this would be read as "colon dash
left peren" or something similar.
Expand abbreviations the first time you use them.
•
This is particularly important for abbreviations that could be plausible words.
For example "Ministry of Defence (MoD)". Screen reader programs will
attempt to read most abbreviations as words and this may be confusing if it's
not obvious from the context. In some cases this will help everyone who is
reading your post.
Keep signatures short.
• Students with dyslexia and those using assistive technology may have
difficulty distinguishing your signature from a continuation of your post
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