Past experiences with Discussion Forums

I've taught 6 or 7 fully online college courses. In those, the discussion forum is the backbone of the course. It IS the classroom and only through frequent use by both instructor and all participants can you establish a social context for learning. I had a good mentor for my first course or two (Joni!) and so early on learned that if you set a proper decorum and kick off the ocurse with engaging activities centered around forum discussions, that participants will have buy-in and the conversations will flow. In most of my courses there was a constant chatter between/among the students and between myself and the students. We were all learning from one another. Very cool, very engaging.

And then there was the course where my co-instructor was very cynical about forums and the need to create a social environment for the course. He taught most of the first half of the course and by the time I got fully involved, the course had become nothing more than a correspondence course where all the communication was pretty much a one-dimensional back and forth between the instructor and each student in turn. Yuck.