USING THE DISCUSSION BOARD DURING YOUR ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS CLASS TO ENGAGE STUDENTS

ABSTRACT

Educators constantly wrestle with the question of how to engage students in an environment in which students are increasingly distracted. This issue has become more relevant as instructors have been forced to pivot to the use of a variety of online learning modalities to administer instruction. While the synchronous online class session allows for the safe delivery of instruction, it also makes it difficult to engage an entire class of students during the session. The current article proposes the synchronous use of the online discussion board during the class session as a mechanism for enhancing student engagement. This innovation was selected for the 2021 Wessex Press Innovations in Teaching Award.

Overview of the Situation

Many instructors have encountered the challenge of engaging an entire class during synchronous, online class sessions. The use of technology can make it difficult to engage more than a few students at a time during these sessions and it is a battle, often a losing one, to keep distractions at bay (Supiano, 2020). Adapting the online discussion board for use during the class session is one approach to overcome this. The synchronous use of the online discussion board addresses the issue of engaging the entire class because all students are required to participate. This participation has been identified as an important dimension of college student engagement (Handelsman, Briggs, Sullivan, & Towler, 2005). Additionally, students who may not feel comfortable speaking during class have indicated an appreciation for the synchronous online discussion format (Ackerman & Gross, 2021), which could be achieved utilizing the chat feature in Zoom or through a Learning Management System such as Blackboard or Canvas. This is also consistent with Generation Z’s tendency to prefer communicating via texting and social media (Anderson & Jiang, 2018) and using technology to pass time and connect with others (Schaeffer, 2019).

Traditionally, online discussion boards have been used to create a sense of community and engage students in asynchronous online courses (Andresen, 2009). This often takes place over an extended time period, such as one week, and students are encouraged to support their posts with documentation from external sources (Thomas, 2002). However, the pace of this type of communication can be slow and feel more like you’re on a desert Island communicating by way of a message in a bottle rather than having a discussion with your classmates. Synchronous online discussion boards offer a venue for creating a faster-paced, more engaging discussion.

While engaging discussions can take place in the chat feature of Zoom, the online discussion board located in a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Blackboard or Canvas offers some advantages, to both students and instructors, over the Zoom chat. First, the Zoom chat is not organized. Comments and responses are not directly linked together and can easily become lost as more individuals enter the chat. Engaging in a conversation might require scrolling through numerous comments that may or may not be related to an individual’s post in the chat. However, the LMS online discussion board allows students to create a thread to which others respond. This thread is the beginning of a conversation. While the student’s initial post in the thread addresses the instructor’s prompt, other students join the thread and engage in the conversation taking place on that thread. This creates an atmosphere that is similar to a dinner party, where you mill around the room and join different conversations. Students can communicate directly with the creator of the thread or anyone else who has responded to that thread. In the LMS online discussion board these comments are all grouped together. Second, the LMS online discussion board allows the instructor to view the comments by thread or by student. A rubric can also be attached to assist in grading. These options are not available in the chat feature in Zoom.

How can instructors create engaging discussions? We can look to social media for an example. The movie Zola, released in 2021, is based on a viral 148-tweet tweetstorm from 2015. The series of tweets written by a young Detroit waitress and dancer, details the story of a road-trip to Florida that went horribly wrong. People became so engrossed in the story that the series of tweets became the basis for a movie and the tweets were subsequently published as a book (Grady, 2021). While this progression from tweet to movie to book may seem counter-intuitive to most of us, maybe there is some value in utilizing this type of captivating communication to engage students in a synchronous online discussion board.

Implementing the Innovation

This innovation was initially administered in a MWF synchronous, online class during the 50-minute Monday class sessions. Monday classes were selected to allow the discussion to serve as a springboard for marketing concepts that would be discussed later in the week, so students do not need to have prior knowledge of the topic. The students were not required to log into Zoom for the session and the instructor did not actively participate in but observed the discussion. The discussion opened 10 minutes before the start of class and closed promptly at the end of class. Students were required to post their response to the instructor’s initial discussion questions before they could enter the discussion and see the posts of their classmates. Additionally, they were expected to enter the discussion within the first 15 minutes of class and remain in the discussion throughout the entire 50-minute class session. Students were provided the following instructions which were also posted in advance on the announcements section of the course learning management system:

• You must post your initial response to my question BEFORE you can read the other posts.

• Do not Google information to add to your post. It will not get you additional points and it will waste time.

• You must respond to my original Discussion Prompt/Question and the posts of at least 3 different students.

• Spread your posts THROUGHOUT the entire class session.

• You must post a minimum of 500 words total. How you divide the word count is up to you. This means your original response AND your replies to your classmates should total 500 words.

• When commenting on the posts of your classmates, be respectful, but it is not enough to agree or like someone’s post. You are trying to create a discussion. It’s a good idea to comment on a post you DISAGREE with. This gives you a solid basis for discussion.

Creating a Zola Moment to Enhance Student Engagement

The key to creating a Zola moment lies in the selection of the discussion topic. The discussion topic should be current and relevant to your student population. Selecting a current, relevant topic for the synchronous online discussion enhances student engagement because it is likely to increase student motivation during this active learning exercise (Barkley, 2018; Hamilton, 2018). Students are not required to know how the discussion relates to marketing; the instructor will refer back to the discussion when examining marketing concepts in the subsequent class sessions. The instructor will provide background information, pictures and possibly video along with the discussion question. An example is presented below. Photos and screenshots of the tweets were also included with the following text.

Example of Text for Instructor Discussion Question/Prompt

Background

On Feb. 16, in a now-deleted tweet, ESPN’s Sports Center posted a graphic created by an artist on Instagram (@dayxsleep) meant to highlight the GOATs of the games. Included in the image were Muhammad Ali, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Tiger Woods and more, standing in a stadium mingling with a few actual goats. Simone Biles and others responded to the tweet.

Some noted that it appeared as though one woman was in the image, if you look hard enough. Tennis great Serena Williams seems to have been squeezed into the back row on the right side of the image. However, an alternate version of the picture shared by the artist a few days before didn’t feature that addition.

Discussion Question/Prompt

What do you think about the fact that ACTUAL GOATS were included in the image, but no women were included in the original image (Serena Williams was added later)? How does this kind of thinking influence the ability of female athletes to endorse products (this is a HUGE source of revenue for athletes)?

This discussion generated a lot of student engagement. Twenty-one students participated in this discussion generating ninety-eight individual posts within fifty minutes. Within this discussion, one thread, which began 10 minutes after the start of class and continued until 2 minutes before the end of class, generated 17 individual posts and engaged nine different students for 38 minutes. (See Web Appendix A for an example of the discussion posts). This particular thread was initiated by a graphic design student who engaged his classmates from the perspective of an artist and advocated for the autonomy of artists when creating works. This is consistent with the findings of Ackerman and Gross (2021), in which students expressed an appreciation for the diversity of perspectives held by their classmates that were uncovered through the discussion. Moreover, as students at an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and University), they were especially pleased with the introduction of current topics that were culturally relevant to their experiences. Additional discussion topics are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Example of discussion topics and related marketing concepts

Discussion Topic	Additional Information Provided to Students	Instructor Discussion Question/Prompt to Students	Related Marketing Concepts
Rapper Lil’ Uzi Vert implanted a $24 million-dollar pink diamond in his forehead.	Photo of Lil’ Uzi Vert with diamond embedded in forehead Article where Lil’ Uzi Vert explains his purchase	We have laws that protect consumers from engaging in a variety of dangerous behaviors; should anyone legally be allowed to set a $24 million-dollar diamond in their forehead? If you were the jeweler, would you have sold him the ring knowing what he planned to do with it?	Consumer protection Product liability Responsibilities of retailers
Mattel introduces diverse dolls with a variety of skin tones, body shapes (curves), abilities (wheelchair, prosthetic legs) and skin conditions (vitiligo and albinism).	Photos of the various dolls	How do you think parents and kids will respond to these diverse dolls? Would you buy one of these dolls? Do you think the only people who will buy these dolls are the people who see themselves as similar to these dolls?	Diversity and inclusion Culture Target markets
In response to a TikTok video with the caption “How to make a non-racist breakfast” that went viral, the Aunt Jemima brand became the Pearl Milling Company. This is the name of the original mill that created the Aunt Jemima products.	TikTok video Video of a news story about the name change Picture of the new logo which is a rendering of the original Pearl Mill Pictures of the Aunt Jemima logo throughout the years	What do you think of this new name and image? Would it have been better if they selected a current female name/chef/image for the brand or honored one of the women who portrayed Aunt Jemima in the past by naming the brand after her? Aunt Jemima has had numerous “makeovers” during the years. Why didn’t they just “update” the name and image to represent a modern African American woman? Would that have been enough?	Branding Cultural influences Social issues and marketing

Insights and Adaptations

An important insight gained during the utilization of this innovation is that grading online discussion boards can be very time consuming. Although the 500-word minimum was designed to encourage students to remain in the discussion for the entire class period, this was the most difficult dimension of the assignment to assess. As an aid, the instructor developed a word count cheat sheet, cutting and pasting various examples of student word counts until it became easy to identify whether a student met the criterion. This aspect of the innovation deserves greater attention. A copy of the rubric utilized for this innovation is provided in Web Appendix B.

While this innovation has been utilized in Principles of Marketing, Advertising, and Retailing courses with a maximum of 30 undergraduate students, it could easily be adapted across a variety of marketing courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Further adaptations could include assigning students to discussion groups for large classes and embedding the discussion into a 75-minute or longer class session. In a 3-hour class session the instructor could begin with a lecture (50 minutes) that leads into the synchronous online discussion board (30 minutes), followed by a 10-minute break. When the Zoom session resumes, an in-class follow-up of the discussion board (30-minutes) ending with additional lecture. Additional adaptations could include further condensing the discussion time period (20 minutes) as well as allowing students to upload video responses.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website