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The instructional environment for an online computer programming course should discussion board to improve the learning process. Programming assignments and the textbook should be supplemented with online discussion to enhance ideas and clarify points of interest via a course management system such as Blackboard or WebCT. It is recommended that all student questions related to the course 
material be directed to the discussion board to spur dialog and to
streamline similar questions and answers. The discussion board has proven to be very helpful in that it triggers fruitful design and implementation dialog among the students and forces them to communicate their technical ideas in natural language (Ritzhaupt and Zucker, 2005). The use of the discussion board should be restricted, however. If not, it is possible that students will post solutions to the programming assignments and those less motivated students will simply copy and paste the programming solution as if it were their own. Since a primary goal of a computer programming course is to encourage to think critically, adopting a formal protocol to prevent this from happening is necessary. |