Reasons for Focusing more on Discussion Forum
Discussion forums and QA sessions are very important for all eLearning businesses. Learners depend a lot on these channels for clarifications, queries and often, a community feeling. The online course content and support resources are sometimes not enough for a comprehensive understanding of the subject for different types of learners. The discussion boards and chatrooms provide a safe place for such learners to bring up confusing topics and present their doubts to their fellow learners. Surveys show that learners often focus more on the answers from a discussion board rather than going through Google results for an answer. This shows that the creation and maintenance of a positive environment within the discussion boards or forums is extremely essential. In this article, we are going to highlight some major reasons why creating a focused discussion forum or board is extremely beneficial for your digital academy.
Opportunity for various perspectives
A forum provides a platform for various people to come together and share their perspectives. This helps everyone to share their points and learn from each other’s perspective. This helps to grow and develop everyone. For example, in Western culture and movies, the focus is on individualism and the pursuit of happiness for an individual, but the Asian culture highlights the importance of family and the happiness of a family as one entity through thick and thin. Thus similarly the discussion about various viewpoints in the forum platform is not only fun but challenging too.
Making it a team effort
Peer review is an important factor for a team-building exercise. For example, think of a classroom full of kids and a teacher to supervise over them. Now if the teacher gives them an assignment, the teacher can check it or give the students an opportunity to check each other and thus they will get to learn from each other and understand where the other one made mistakes and ultimately where they can improve themselves. Thus similarly in an online forum, the instructor might not be online and hence here the peer review helps as other who have completed the course or if they know the answer to a problem, can solve it on behalf of the instructor and help each other out.
Fun activities like games and quizzes
The forum can become a fun place to organise and host online games and quizzes where everyone can take part and interact with each other. This can become a fun exercise and team building activity for everyone. They can also have fun and learn at the same time. Thus the forum can be utilised in a good way and that’s beneficial for all. You can also choose guessing games where one person can try to draw a figure and the first one to guess it correctly wins. These types of games might seem pointless but these are the secrets of a great course where all the learners feel like they are together and form bonds with each other.
Great place for Student-Teacher Interaction
Forums are an open place for Student and teacher interaction and where other people can also see how active the instructor is and how he behaves with all the learners. They will be encouraged to come forward and interact more and this will keep the forum alive with interaction and posts from all. It also shows that the creator cares about the people and tries to interact with them. This keeps the morale up and everyone engaged in the course and helps it to spread out to more people.
Current affairs
The forums are a great place to discuss the various current affairs and they help to communicate all learners with each other. They come together and discuss a topic which shows up as notification for others and more people slowly join in the discussion to present their views. Like these everyone can stay up to date with the latest news and the instructor can check up with everyone about their well beings and their feedback about the course.
Creative Games and Activities
A number of online courses utilise creative tools to engage the minds of their learners and push them to create innovative projects using the knowledge gained from the course. One such creative method is the “Round Robin activities”. In this method, the course instructor begins the cycle by making a statement or project using relevant information from the topics covered. Next, a student can continue this thread and add something to the statement or project. This continues for a long time as students put their minds to this fun project and think up of ways to create something relevant. Most importantly, these activities create a safe and fun way to apply knowledge and thus they increase the retention rate of the course.
At CreateOnlineAcademy.com, you get the best of creative tools and authoring platform which you can use to design every component of your digital academy according to your wishes. COA’s platform offers you the best support options so that you can create and launch your courses without any worries. To view more attractive aspects of their packages, click on the link given above.
