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Managing Research Projects

Managing Research Projects

Discussion Boards/Forums

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Discussion boards and online discussion fora can be a useful way of supplementing the formal meetings of a research team.  Features of the commonly used software mean that postings made to the forum or board are archived and can be accessed again at a later date and discussions can be 'threaded' (separated into distinct topics) making separate dialogues easier to follow.

The disadvantages of using discussion boards or online fora are that users have to go to a web address and log in to read correspondence, although some automatically forward posts to email – and allow posts to forum through email.

If you plan to use discussion boards and for a as a method of communication for your research team, the following guidelines may be helpful:

If users agree set up email forwarding so that posts to the discussion board also arrive in users' email.

  • Assign someone to moderate the discussion board, linking email threads where there is overlap, acting as a fallback to ensure that every post is responded to.
  • Maintaining a constant high level of engagement with a discussion board is notoriously difficult. Even if there are some active participants, these will become demotivated if there are no new posts by others when they log in. Discussion boards require a minimum level of activity (of at least a post every day or so) in order for others to wish to participate. Although these are asynchronous technologies, they are often most successful when participants are directed to take part in time-dependent discussions. If a debate is to take place over a few days only, then the rate of correspondence is much higher, and is therefore maintained.

communication systems