ABSTRACT
Online learning has gained momentum over the past few decades especially after the pandemic. Most schools these days are offering some online classes and many with complete degrees. This teaching modality is good fit for the students who have a busy schedule at work and have other responsibilities at home. However, to offer an effective online class poses a lot of challenges on the instructor’s part. One such challenge is to keep the students engaged and help them achieve learning outcomes set for the course. The main reason as to why student engagement can become an issue in an online class is because in such classes, the students and instructor do not meet in person. To help overcome this challenge there is a need for a platform where there is an instructor-student interaction as well as peer interaction. This paper discusses the effectiveness of one such pedagogical tool “Discussion Boards” which is used widely by the instructors in their online classes to keep the students engaged and help them achieve the learning objectives. Further the paper will also discuss the results of a survey given to the students regarding their experience participating in these online discussion boards.
Keywords
Online learning, discussion boards, student engagement