Online Forums

With the rapid development of internet, many forums are built online. Frequent users of this kind of forum are normally people who share the same interests, for example, music, food, traveling and etc. There are also forums focusing on academic purposes, such as English learning and Mathematics learning.


When I was taking English tests to apply for graduate students in the United States, I found it extremely difficult to prepare everything all by myself. Fortunately, one of my friends recommended to me a Chinese website (called TAISHA): http://bbs.taisha.org/, and it helped me a lot during my preparation. TAISHA forum originated from a smaller, non-profitable one several years ago. At the beginning, the main and only purpose was to provide a forum for examinees of TOEFL, GRE and GMAT to communicate and share experiences. At present, however, it has been developed into a forum for people to discuss knowledge/experience in other fields as well, including languages (English, French, Spanish, and etc), mathematics, and science.


Before I go too far, I would like to compare this kind of website to the "blackboard" website that we, as students from NYU or other universities, have been using. People having accesses to one particular course in "blackboard" are and only are students registered for this class. However, people using this kind of forums can be anyone that is interested in this subject from all over the world.


If we manage to take advantage of this kind of forums like TAISHA during our ordinary teaching and learning procedure, I believe it can help us from three aspects.                


To begin with, these websites can help to generate students’ interests into the learning subjects. Unlike "blackboard" is for teachers to post materials that are strongly related to the teaching contents, forums are more like a complimentary tool/source to help students. Students are only recommended but not required to visit these websites. Instead, teachers can post out-class fun/light-reading materials that might trigger students’ interests on here. For example, teachers in physics can post interesting results from modern physical experiments into the frontier of researches, like the latest results from supercolliders. These results are normally fantastic. It helps to teach students how these experiments can help people understand the mysterious beginning of the universe as well as why learning physics is interesting and important.


Additionally, these forums help teachers to hear more from students. Although there is already a feedback system included in the "blackboard", there is still reason to believe that students are afraid of saying their thoughts and suggestions about the courses out loud unless posting their thoughts anonymously. Having this forum where everyone is registered with their own nick names, which no one else recognizes, will help students have the courage to share their suggestions.


Last but not least, it can also help students feel less lonely and frustrated when facing endless assignments and papers during heavy course loads. Under such circumstances, students tend to complain about loneliness and frustration within small groups, like their friends. If they have access to such a website, they can share their stress and feelings with professors and other students from the same class. It helps them understand that they are not alone. Students can even discuss their confusions, ideas about problem without having to sit next to each other. From this point of view, these websites serve the same purpose as "Facebook" although with more focus on academic purposes


However, we cannot neglect the down sides of these forums while keeping an eye on the bright side. Firstly, these forums are only functional and efficient under careful and effective supervisions. Questions need to be answered in time, and topics that are not related to the subject need to be removed fast. All these tasks require a huge amount of time, attention, and efforts. Therefore, building up a successful, stable forum is a long-term project. Secondly, parents need to keep an eye on their children while they are surfing the internet, or children might look for things they are interested in instead of useful knowledge under the cover of “studying online”.


Overall, these forums focusing on academic purposes can support our teaching and learning system dramatically if we are able to use them wisely, and under sufficient control.