UIC Board Manager's Guide: WebBoard Version 3.5

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8. Tips and Suggestions

In this section we will try to give the instructor some tips for effective usage of WebBoard as a tool for online instruction. Comments for improvement and sharing of your own experiences are appreciated, please email them to webboard@uic.edu. They will be incorporated into the next version of this guide.

Often, your students will reach WebBoard through a link from your class homepage. It is important, however, that they know the complete URL of their class board, as well as that of the UIC WebBoard user's guide at

http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/itl/webboard

Please remind your students to come with access problems to you. Do not send them to the computer center or suggest emailing the WebBoard administrators. If there are any problems that you cannot solve, you are always welcome to email us at webboard@uic.edu.

To make the transition to WebBoard conferencing easier, it is not a bad idea to schedule an optional first class meeting in a UIC computer lab, where you and your support staff can help the students make the first steps in using WebBoard. For students unable to make this initial class, it is important that you provide some initial guidance on your class homepage, including a link to the UIC WebBoard user guide.

Your board should have a conference set up for free chatting/posting, unrelated to class topics. That decreases student anxiety and helps them gaining familiarity with WebBoard more quickly.

If you are serious about using WebBoard for online instruction, you need to make your students participate on a regular basis, but you also need to participate yourself. Successful instructors frequently check for student questions (2-3 times per day), observe group discussions and chats, and make themselves easily available for questions. You may want to schedule a weekly office hour via a live chat. Encourage your students to email you privately for questions about grades or problems with group interaction etc.

If WebBoard is to be more than a forum for relaxed conversation about class topics, you need to enforce student participation in some way. Their course grade should reflect their participation in discussions and group projects. You may also want to require that they logon to WebBoard regularly, or make a minimum number of postings per week or month. Do not require a minimum number of postings per semester, as it is crucial that students get going in WebBoard right away – seasonal work is extremely counterproductive. You could, say, set aside 5 points for each week in which they made at least two postings with an actual contribution (not just "Me too." posts). This is of course just an example.

Students' participation in group projects can easily be observed if you set up a private conference per group and require that they do their group discussions via WebBoard postings. If you wish to use real-time chats for these group conferences and would like to log the chat, you need to have someone keep copying and pasting the chat messages into a text document - there is no client-side logging feature.

One of your conferences should be reserved for announcements from you and your TA(s)/staff. Make this a read-only conference, so students cannot post to it. In order to allow your TA(s)/staff to post to this conference, you need to make them moderators of this conference. In this conference, you should post your policies for using WebBoard in great detail. Knowing what you expect from them during the semester and how this will contribute to their grade is crucial for students' acceptance of WebBoard and regular participation.

The Announcements -conference should normally be listed at the top, so important messages from you are quickly seen by the students.

WebBoard is a tool for exchanging questions, opinions, and information. You and your students can also present for discussion short materials in the form of texts, images, or attached documents. WebBoard is not a content delivery system, however. If you wish to present a unit of instructional materials, WebBoard is probably not your best choice. Create those materials as ordinary webpages, using your favorite web-authoring tool. Then you can link to those pages from a message in WebBoard. In general, you probably want to design your course as a whole set of webpages, with WebBoard just one component being linked to from your main course page. You may also wish to consider using Blackboard, a full-featured online teaching environment available at UIC.

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