Discussion Board Alternatives

Recently, Piazza announced that it is moving to a new funding model in January 2021, meaning institutions, instructors, or students must either pay a fee for the tool or continue to use the free version of Piazza, which will soon include advertisements.  Due to this change, Northwestern IT removed Piazza from Canvas on December 18, 2020. If you wish to continue using Piazza for teaching and learning, you can do so by visiting piazza.com. However, we encourage you to carefully review and remain aware of Piazza’s evolving privacy policies and to consider the risks and impact of an ad-supported experience on your classes.

It can be very frustrating to rework activities that were previously successful in your class and find alternatives that work for you and your students. The following alternatives do not serve as a replacement for Piazza, but they are meant to help anyone looking for an improved discussion board experience to understand the currently available, free, Northwestern-supported options.

Q&A

There is no separate Q&A feature in Canvas discussion boards, however, one option is to create a discussion board that is open all quarter. Name the discussion board “Ask An Instructor” or “Q&A” and direct students to to this board to ask common questions. At the start of the class, set expectations around how the instructor or students should engage with this board. For example:

• I (instructor) will monitor the board and respond to any question within 24 hours. Do not post questions about your grades or other individual inquiries; this Q&A is specifically for content questions or questions about assignments.
• Students, you can answer each other’s questions! At the end of the quarter, I’ll look over the board and give extra credit to students who successfully helped answer their classmates’ questions.

Annotating Documents

If your discussions are predominantly focused around reading materials or PDF documents, consider moving the discussion out of a discussion board and into an annotation tool like Perusall or Hypothesis. These annotation tools allow students and instructors to discuss, comment on, collaboratively mark up, and post questions on documents and textbooks. Students can take notes and answer each other’s questions directly within the text.

Learn how Suzen Moeller, Lecturer, School of Professional Studies, uses Hypothesis

Learn how Emily Kadens, Professor of Law, Pritzker School of Law, uses Perusall

Alternative Discussion Board View

In 2015, McCormick faculty member Seyed Iravani and his then-teaching assistant Jacqueline Ng Lane wanted to significantly improve participation in online conversations. Working with Bill Parod and Jacob Collins in Northwestern IT, the group built Nebula, a visual graphical interface for Canvas discussion boards. In Nebula, conversations are interactive graphs in which posts and replies are nodes and links.

That means the conversation, which usually looks like the first image, is turned into the graphical view in the second image.

 Since 2015, development of Nebula has continued with the current version, Nebula 2, now available to install via the Canvas at Northwestern Learning Apps site.

With Nebula 2, at a glance instructors and students can see the hotspots in the conversation. The graphical view makes it easy to see where side threads split off from the main conversation, but it keeps the initial post at easy reach for reference. However, the graphical interface isn’t the only way to view the discussion. Students and instructors can concurrently use an improved traditional view of the discussion. The traditional view also means that Nebula 2 is accessible for screen readers. Participants can toggle back and forth at will, moving between the two interfaces as they prefer.

New Prompts

Consider some new prompts for and approaches to discussion boards. While there are enough ideas out there on different approaches to discussion boards to fill another whole article, (5 New Twists for Online Discussions, 5 Tips for Improving Online Discussion Boards, 10 Tips for Effective Online Discussions), this article from Inside Higher Ed is a great place to start. It includes ideas such as asking for posts in 3CQ form [a compliment, a comment, a connection (3C), and a question (Q)] and grading that prioritizes posts “that advance the conversation.”

Game-Style Approach

Discussion Hero is a Canvas tool developed at Northwestern University that provides an entertaining and engaging game-style approach to participating in discussion boards. The philosophy behind Discussion Hero is that online discussion boards can be made more productive by leveraging game-style formats that encourage diverse points of view, questioning, and respectful debate and dialogue. It uses traditional awarding of points with a game-like progress meter that is generated by a customizable rating rubric. This progress meter allows students to see how they are performing on their discussion posts in real-time and provides an incentive to view participation as healthy competition.

Install Discussion Hero directly into one of your Canvas courses by following the instructions on the Canvas at Northwestern Learning Apps site.

Want to explore some of these ideas in more depth? Request a consultation with one of the Teaching & Learning Technologies team members to discuss using alternative discussion board tools or approaches in your course.