Distance Education: Losing the Thread

I blogged a while back about an online course I have been taking which is purely via distance education (ie no residence requirements, weekends, seminars etc).  There is also no webcasting or videoconferencing so it relies completely on electronic discussion boards, online assessments and .pdf teaching materials.  I mentioned previously that one of the advantages of the course is its anonymity.  As it is not a professional training course, anonymity actually seems to be a good thing and people are not abusing the privilege of working with pseudonyms by writing inflammatory or inappropriate items.  However, one serious downside of this method of teaching (particularly with no instantaneous form of communication with classmates) is that we are completely reliant on discussion threads to communicate with each other.  As such, sometimes one can lose the thread (literally) of an interesting discussion.  It is very hard to keep track of all the discussions threads one may have contributed to, and sometimes a promising conversation gets lost in the shuffle.  I wondered if anyone has experienced better ways of teaching/learning online than use of discussion threads?  Or better ways of organizing discussion threads than merely query by query?  Because the course is international, the discussion thread modality deals really well with the time differences between classmates, but doesn't deal well with organizing discussions.

Comments

[Beth Haas]

Hi, Jacqueline. I feel your pain. I'm Dan's colleague and I created and am currently teaching our first online course (Professional Responsibility). The learning management system ("LMS" or platform) through which a course is offered usually determines the usefulness, ease and limitations of various tools, such as threaded discussion boards. When I built our course in Bb Vista, for example, we noticed that the threaded discussion boards did not "look" or "feel" comfortable as the discussions bloomed and I was afraid that posts would get lost in the threading (as you have described). So, instead of using threaded discussions, we opted to use a blog tool which makes the discussions appear much more like they do here in The Faculty Lounge -- you can respond to a primary query on the main board but you can also comment on individual posts and begin new "threads" which, in theory, should not get lost. Many LMSes offer Wiki tools, which allow collaborative discussions and many platforms are now offering tools that look and feel much more like the social networking sites to which we have all grown so accustomed. I'm not sure what platform your course is using, but you might want to see whether the course offers alternative tools for blogs or wikis or other add-ons that might solve your problem.

[Jacqui Lipton]

That's a great idea. Thanks.
In fact, a group of us from my class have now set up a Yahoo discussion board and that seems a little more user-friendly.