Introduction of Problem
For facilitating discussions across a variety of courses, instructors may opt to use a discussion-board system to allow all students in the course to voice their thoughts. While UGA leverages the D2L (eLC) system for course management, the built-in discussion board is often left unused in favor of a third-party solution known as Piazza. The built-in discussion board on eLC lacks several important affordances
Using a third party discussion board can cause problems for both instructors and students. Users may feel inconvenienced by needing to fill out and sign up for another service to accomplish a task, rather than being able to use systems with comparable features built-in. With a rising number of website breach incidents, users are becoming increasingly hesitant on sharing personal information, even at a basic level (ie. Email, First and Last Name). Once the new account is created, users encounter more issues with workflow and maintenance. Workflow transitions from one interface to another may constitute to a decrease in productivity (ie. changing websites to log into another service). Additionally, utilizing a third-party solution may create additional work for instructors such as managing another service, ensuring roster is complete on secondary platform, managing roles for TAs, and related tasks.
Discussion boards facilitate an interactive in-class experience. Using a digital system allows each students to voice their thoughts, rather than a select number physically responding in class, potentially leaving out some students from sharing their thoughts. It allows for collaboration among peers, with the ability for the entire class to see posts from multiple perspectives. Using a system such as this allows students to retroactively look back at their responses to further deepen their understanding on course materials. Particularly for larger section classes, using a discussion board allows for a large pool of students to be able to assist other students, leaving instructors the ability to endorse an answer, and potentially lessen their workload.
Potential Users
The user population that will be affected by our problem of study includes students and professors. These users will perform tasks such as creating and replying to posts, upvoting posts as helpful, organizing posts by topic, and replying to discussion posts. Leveraging a Piazza-like interface within ELC will benefit users by allowing them to use one platform instead of having to rely on a third party system. Being integrated into the main course management system affords users to easily click into the discussion board, rather than need to log into a separate service. The more users that leverage these features, the more discussion that can be fostered as a result. This can lead to more impactful face to face interactions, all leading to impactful learning for students to benefit from.
We analyzed three discussion boards that have attempted something similar to eLC. Slack, Piazza, and Google Docs all incorporate features that we believe are essential to facilitate meaningful discussion. Below are the pros and cons of each platform, including eLC's discussion board.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Piazza
Pros
Cons
Google Docs
Pros
Cons
After reviewing existing solutions, Slack has the most comprehensive list of guidelines and principles. Slack lists three main aspects to digital product design: User-centered problem solving, User interface and experience design, and Collaboration and communication. In the next steps for this project, our group will adhere to the following guidelines and principles.
1. User-Centered Problem Solving
2. User Interface and Experience Design
3. Collaboration and Communication
As a general plan, develop an online discussion platform to support in-class learning that can be integrated into the Universities existing learning platform. This platform will blend helpful affordances from similar products such as Piazza, Slack, and Google Docs. In order to create one cohesive discussion platform, we will implement the following affordances:
Our group will use the following key performance indicators (KPIs):
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Discussions: Engaging students: ELC Help. Discussions Engaging Students eLC Help. (n.d.). Retrieved October 5, 2021, from https://help.elc.uga.edu/engaging_students/discussions/
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