| Selected Communication Management Scenarios |
Description/Example |
Selected Potential Advantages |
Selected Possible Tradeoff(s) |
| Student assigned communication roles |
Student moderated/lead discussion in a private Discussion Board |
Facilitates time management of instructor; discussion facilitation practice/demonstration for student |
Student may not effectively moderate/lead communication (i.e. go off topic); may require more of instructor’s time to get off track discussion back on the topic. |
| Instructor assigned communication roles |
Instructor assigned as the moderator of class Discussion Board |
Instructor can more readily monitor the, comments, responses, resources, etc. in a discussion and can reply more responsively |
Possibility for instructor to dominate the discussion; possibility for students to wait/or be overly dependent for instructor comments in the discussion |
| Forum for questions |
Discussion Board/Virtual Classroom forum for questions about an upcoming exam |
Providing anonymous (option in Discussion Board) opportunities to ask questions without being identified or embarrassed; provide real-time response to questions (Virtual Classroom). |
If anonymous option isn’t used (Discussion Board), students may feel embarrassed and not post questions; the Virtual Classroom is not ideal for groups over 5, thus more than one session may required for the questions forum |
| Private (1 student & instructor) group communications |
Instructor has a group for each student where this group members only include the instructor and the respective student |
Student can submit non-emergency documents, comments, journal entries, etc. in Blackboard instead of to the instructor’s e-mail account; better organization than with the Digital Dropbox for large classes and/or for courses with high volume of file submissions |
Students may ask the same non-private question in each of their respective private group forum with the instructor; instructor could accidentally provide different answers to same non-personal question in the private group communication |
| Social/practice communications |
Instructor has a Discussion Board forum set up for non course topics |
Students can have an official forum for non course topics to help foster community; students can network and practice using the discussion forum in a less formal environment |
It is possible for the “off topic” forum to become very voluminous, thus making it more time consuming to monitor (e.g. identify inappropriate messages); possibility for students to post message in the “off topic” forum that should be posted in a course topic forum |
Communications Management