Discord as a discussion forum - initial thoughts from last fall

Last fall, I got to design and teach a course that I've been wanting to teach for a very long time: Language Learning and Technology (or, in other words, Computer-Assisted Language Learning - if you are in the language education field). It was a lot of fun to design, and a good experience to teach. I really enjoy design work (even though I don't get to do it often), and it's been ages since I taught a class that was a regular graduate class; all of my grad courses since 2021 have been Capstone courses, which I've treated mostly like a studio space with peer review.  There isn't a lot of "discussion" that happened in that kind of course.

Anyway, the last time I taught a course with regular weekly discussions, we used Blackboard "Classic."  I've been using discussion forums on Canvas for a few years now through my OLC facilitation, and before that, I've had experience with a variety of LMS and their associated forum functionality.  They are all pretty similar, and honestly, I felt a bit bored by the format, having used this format both as a learner and as an instructor since 2005. Over the years, both as a learner and as an instructor, what I've seen most students do is to jump in, say something by some initial deadline, leave, come back 4 days later, post responses to one or two peers, and disappear again until next week.  That's not really a discussion; there's a lack of idea exchange. I've described this behavior like a drive-by shouting: You're in a slow-moving car, you shout something out the window, and you speed away. Meanwhile, the people on the side of the road who are having a conversation are left asking, "what was that about?"  When I was new to teaching, I was using a discussion board rubric based on the Middle Tennessee State University discussion forum grading rubric. It was fine, it worked fine, and students got their grade, but over the years, this seems like a lot of work for a discussion forum activity that's worth 10% of overall participation. 

What did I want to discussion to be like?  I wanted it to be more "of the moment." If students were reading something in the weekly readings, I wanted them to be able to come online and post something that intrigued them, even if they had not read ALL the readings just yet. I wanted this facility to be in their pocket, so if they had their phone there while reading (even if they didn't have access to a laptop for Canvas), they could just share multimodal content with others.  I also wanted them to share what they found with others in a more drip fashion.  Found a relevant podcast episode, article, or resource? Why not share it with others?  Finally, I wanted folks to feel like the discussion forum was more of a watercooler rather than a space where they felt compelled to be twice per week. Given all this, I decided to give Discord a try.  Yes, I know that Canvas has a mobile app, but while their UI was innovative for 2011 when I first encountered it (and also in comparison to other LMS providers of the time), it feels a bit stale today and not conducive to what I wanted it to do.

Here were some parameters for discussion forums each week:

• Students needed to "log in" five days per week and post something.
• This means that they needed at least five posts per week.
• The posts could be anything relating to the course, I'd also accept a post per week that was off-topic (e.g., share a funny photo of your pet, a recommendation for a TV show, or whatever builds community).
• Students would need to participate in the weekly topic, but if there was a week that just didn't resonate with them, they could lurk in that channel, read what others wrote, and post in other channels.

Granted, I don't know what's in people's heads - I can't assess whether the 'discussion' that occurred was what I intended it to be, but the continued participation throughout the week made things feel a bit more genuine than the forum participation I've experienced since 2022.

This was an interesting experience. It didn't work out exactly as I had planned (few things in design ever do, that's the whole point of evaluation), but it was something I'd try again.  The one thing that LMS-based forums do well enough is to collate posts for each forum, and you can get some basic clickstream analytics to see when people are active. This isn't something that is available in Discord, so I needed to manually track participation using a spreadsheet. The challenge that I hadn't accounted for was keeping accurate tracking of which days AND which forums people participated in so that I could enforce that 5-day rule.  Ultimately, I ended up being a bit lenient on the participation grading component because of the changing methodology of keeping track of posts.

Have you used an alternative to the discussion forum (that isn't Voicethread)?  What do you think?