Mitigating Online Learning Frustration by Documenting Discussion Board Exchanges

The Authors

The authors of this chapter are white, cisgender women with Western European ancestry. Three of us were raised Christian, one is atheist, and all of us are considered “well-educated,” having successfully navigated our elementary, secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate schooling experiences. Despite our different roles and responsibilities, we spend our days in community with other teachers and students. We’re keenly aware that our histories are with us, hovering over our keyboards and shaping how we soften or sharpen the screen as we try to create meaningful online learning experiences for the students we serve. In the past, we’ve relied on various popular but, too often, less than ideal practices and came together to do better. Each of us has witnessed how unproductive frustration levels undermine performance in our classrooms. Past interventions–focused squarely on adapting course content, the learning process, or what learners were expected to produce as evidence of that learning–were the result of necessary and earnest efforts, but often produced less than satisfying results. These experiences challenged us to choose a different pathway through our courses, learning more about the influence of teacher identity on instructional practices, relationship building in online classrooms, and how to make the best use of standard online tools.

Our Pedagogical Philosophy

In addition to our demographic similarities, the four of us practice the craft of documentation in our classrooms, understanding its essential role in shaping and sustaining individual and shared identities. Rather than trying to quantify learning by evaluating its products, documentarians study the process by capturing photographs, audio and video recordings, and making an investigation of learning artifacts. Too many assessment efforts strive to simplify complex problems and generate quick and tidy conclusions. However, documentation challenges us to explore and better understand the complexities of learning and the learners who are engaged with it. It provides us with the tools to remember, revisit, and rethink the process, too. Documentarians understand that learning is best conveyed through multimodal stories rather than spreadsheets and that if we are to truly understand ourselves and one another, we need to access the whole of those narratives as much and as often as possible.

Anyone involved in teaching would like to believe that learning is a rational and predictable animal. It would be far less frustrating if it were. It’s a human endeavor, though. As such, it’s as emotional as it is rational. It’s fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, beauty and, at times, an absolute beast. Learning is as pedantic as it is artistic, as aesthetic as it is often dull, and even–at times–completely unappealing. Navigating these complex realities–in part–is what inspired this collaboration. We have all begun implementing a variety of promising practices, including alternative grading approaches that include the use of flexible deadlines and allow unlimited revisions of submitted work (Townsley & Schmid, 2020) as well as the use of learning walls (Vance, 2023), liquid syllabi, adaptive teaching, along with asynchronous video communication and discussion (Pacansky-Brock et al., 2020). Shifts in practice often take significant time to implement initially; false starts are common, and iteration is the key to mastery. Few–if any–of us initially implement a promising practice with complete fidelity. Many teachers hope to get things “right” on the first try, but when we attempt to shift too much too fast, we risk doing more harm than good or adding more frustration to our students’ days instead of removing it.