The Importance of Discussion Board Postings in Online Classes
Many students have taken or are taking online classes these days. They are becoming more and more popular each and every year. One of the major fears of an online class is the lack of interaction with the other students and more importantly the professor. Students are scared they won’t be able to reach the professor if they have a question or network with peers in their courses. After doing some research I actually found more students said they interacted with their peers in their online course than sitting in a classroom. This is mainly due to discussion board postings in an online course room. Students are able to post discussion topics in the online forum and other students are able to post comments, ask questions, or just read what the other students have posted. Discussion board postings are usually graded by the professor or graduate assistant and typically count for about 30% of a student’s overall grade. As you can see they are very important in an online class and could help you pass or fail a class!
The discussion board postings could be on a number of different topics. To start a class the professor usually asks the class to do an introduction post to introduce themselves to the rest of the class and so he/she could get to know them a little bit better. After the first post, students are usually required to post three to four times a week and also respond to other students. Discussion board postings are highly interactive and many students login to their course room on a daily basis. The topics of the post could range from: answering questions from the textbook, writing a summary of a video they watched, discussing their opinions on an article and so on. Professors usually try to mix up the different topics to keep students engaged. Sometimes in an online class it is a little harder to do than you would expect.
As you can see there is plenty of interaction between the students and the professors in most online courses. You are able to chat, email, or use discussion board postings to communicate with others. Many students also use Skype. As stated earlier, participation is typically a large percentage of your grade so it is not only recommended it is required! So if your only fear is that you will not be able to reach your professor or network with peers in an online class rest assure that is not the case.