On discussion forums

The only time I had used discussion forums in my life was to read about my immigration file on the canadavisa forum. So from there I had an idea about how informative they can be. But studying through them was a completely different experience. I had no clue that they would be so overwhelming and at the same time so engaging.

In this course we were all assigned a forum that we had to lead and we were expected to participate in each forum. Thus we had discussion on 11 different topics in 7 weeks. These 11 forums elicited 564 responses and 224 links ranging from web pages, articles, videos, talks, infographics, cartoon strips and images from 14 participants. The topics discussed in the forum were self-directed learning and adult learners, learning styles, learning how to learn, questioning techniques, visible learning, group work, flipped classrooms, digital learning instructional strategies, gamification, classroom management and motivation.

The forums played a very significant role in my learning process. First of all, when I think of it as an educator I see that through the forums it was easy for the educator to keep track of our learning, our involvement and regularity even in a distance learning- online format.

Secondly, these forums had an open book format, your contribution was like an open book, you participation was open in the book and so were your comments, this enabled critical learning, for any single comment the participants, just could not sit and write anything, and that resulted into a plethora of valuable information about the topics that were discussed in just a few weeks.

Thirdly, the forums enabled a mega co-creation process in which the topics discussed were not just discussed on a historic revision pattern of what existed on them as a body of knowledge but also what could exist, what sounded illogical and what was more relevant about the concept for a researcher like me, the knowledge generation activity initiated through this forum created so many leads for new research.

The forums were a live example of the power of brain storming and knowledge sharing.

#forum #elearning #engaging