VITAL discussion forums for exam revision in large classes and more generally

For more information contact: Toby Hall.

Students were encouraged to post questions on the forum rather than coming to talk to him or sending him emails. When students did email him with specific questions about the module, he instructed them to post the question on the forum before he would answer it.

He found that this saved him a lot of time answering the same question many times, and that it was also appreciated by the students. Students posted 33 questions in total (22 of them anonymously), and there were 8600 "hits" on the forum, including nearly 2000 in the 24 hours before the exam.

He provided the following instructions for setting up the forum in VITAL. If you feel these need to be modified to make them simpler to follow, please contact Toby Hall.

How to create a discussion forum using VITAL

1. On the left hand side, expand 'Control Panel' under 'Course Management'.
2. Expand the drop down menu under 'Course Tools'.
3. Click on 'Discussion Board' on the drop down menu.
4. In the main page, click on the course code e.g. ELECxxx-201314.
5. On the new page, click on 'Create Forum'.
6. Give the forum a name and set the options as you require.
7. Open a content page using a link on the left hand side, e.g. click on 'Learning Resources'.
8. Ensure that Edit Mode is set to 'ON' - near the top right hand corner of the web page.
9. Roll the cursor over the link 'Add Interactive Tool' and click on the top entry of the drop down list 'Discussion Board'.
10. Highlight the radio button next to 'Select a Discussion Board Forum' and select the Discussion Forum you have just created.
11. Click on 'Next' near the bottom right hand corner of the webpage.
12. The discussion forum is now live but the students are not necessarily aware of its existence so send them an email.

Additional information from Ian Thompson, who used this technique in MATH266 (2014)

Ian Thompson tried this in MATH266 in 2014. He writes: I created the forum in week 12 and told the students to ask revision questions there rather than by email. I continued to receive questions by email, but this stopped after I sent out a reminder. Eventually about 20 questions were posted on the forum, and it received over 1000 hits.

Some things I discovered:

1. As well as creating a link to a forum from a content page (points 7-11 in John Marsland's instructions), it is possible to create a link from the menu on the left-hand side of the window. This fits better with the structure of my Vital pages. To do this, click the '+' symbol at the top left and choose 'Tool Link'.
2. Students seem to like posting anonymously, so it's important to tell them that this is possible.
3. The lecturer can identify anonymous posters by editing their post and unchecking 'post as anonymous'. (Note that I did not experience any problems with inappropriate posts.)
4. Vital has rudimentary support for LaTeX code. Simple equations can be entered in the usual way, but they have to be surrounded by plain TeX style double dollars, i.e. $$a=b$$. However, this feature is extremely flaky. Sometimes the system automatically replaces dollar symbols with ampersands, leading to errors. In addition, I get the error 'Failed to save message' every time I make a post containing mathematics, but the posts do appear on the forum after a delay that lasts for a few seconds.
5. To obtain usage statistics, one must click 'course reports' under 'evaluation'.

If any member of staff would like to see the forum I will add them to the list of users on the module.

Update for 2015

This is not new, I tried it before (unsuccessfully), and Ian Thompson tried it (successfully), and Thomas Eckl talked about it in his Staff Development session. The first time I tried it with MATH243 two years ago, I opened a discussion forum and announced it to students in November, but it did not work, students did not use it. I asked them afterwards, they said they logged in, there was nobody and nothing there and they never came back. This time it worked with both modules. I think there are two reasons why students used the discussion forums this time: When I announced the forum to students I had already put some "fake" questions and answers on, some from emails that students sent to me, some from what I remembered as issues from last year. This way the discussion forum was useful to students straight away. In addition, the forum went live end of December, when students were revising and could not get hold of me in person, and when they emailed me, I answered on the forum and directed them there.

Toby Hall also used a discussion forum for the whole duration of MATH342, rather than just for exam revision. Again, it was heavily used and much appreciated by students. He noticed a marked decrease in the number of students coming to ask questions in his office.