Youtube Discussion Board

The Problem

BlackBoard does not do a good job of facilitating discussions on the discussion board. There are multiple reasons for this, the biggest being the interface itself. Entries can only be viewed one at a time, and the navigation between posts is overly complicated. While I recognize there are some reasons for this (the ability to track specific unread messages, for example), the trade-off isn't worth it. The second biggest problem is that blackboard at this institution (where I'm teaching) cannot be depended on to be available. If students cannot get on blackboard at all, there is no discussion taking place.

A Solution

I wanted to experiment with many different ways of creating electronic discussions. Among the possibilities were a self-hosted discussion board solution, skype, chatroom, and also YouTube. Since the class was already doing a video group project, I thought that it would be appropriate to attempt to have a discussion completely on YouTube.

YouTube is a video hosting and social web application. Any one can create an account and upload a video. They have the choice whether to make the video private, or available to for anyone to see. A video can also be uploaded as a response to another video. It was this response mechanism that I was going use to organize the discussion.

The Discussion

The initial question I posed to the class of future teachers was "What will your 21st century classroom look like, and how will it differ from the classrooms you learned in?" I chose this topic after following an interesting discussion on David Warlick's blog (2 cents), on the same topic.

Reflection

Overall, the discussion board was a great success. While some students did not want to post videos of themselves online, other were really looking forward to it and embraced the opportunity. Those that were hesitant soon followed in their enthusiasm, especially since I gave them permission to not personally appear in the video. Two of my best responses used videos found elsewhere and remixed them into a new message that supported their ideas. Since this is something we had talked about throughout the semester, I was very pleased to see them taking this path. I'm really looking forward to conducting a similar activity in future semesters.

Links

NOTE: other student responses are available under the "Responses" section of the original prompting. Some students have since removed their videos from YouTube after the conclusion of the class