Evaluating Discussion Boards on BlackBoard as a Collaborative Learning Tool A Students Survey and Reflections

TL;DR

This study evaluates student perceptions and engagement with discussion boards on BlackBoard in a junior course, highlighting student feedback and participation levels to assess the tool's effectiveness in collaborative learning.

Contribution

It provides insights into student attitudes and participation in BlackBoard discussion boards, emphasizing their role in enhancing collaborative learning experiences.

Findings

Students showed positive attitudes towards discussion boards.

Participation levels were high due to incentives.

Open comments revealed valuable feedback on the tool's effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how the students think of their experience in a junior level course that has a blackboard course presence where the students use the discussion boards extensively. A survey is set up through blackboard as a voluntary quiz and the student who participated were given a freebie point. The results and the participation were very interesting in terms of the feedback we got via open comments from the students as well as the statistics we gathered from the answers to the questions. The students have shown understanding and willingness to participate in pedagogy-enhancing endeavors.