Engaging the fearful student in forums: Why and how?

An Open University (OU) education is open to all since no formal entry requirements are set. Online learning forums are the prime focus for asynchronous online pedagogy at the OU. However, our 2016 email survey of 429 students found that undergraduate and postgraduate students were often lacking in confidence and therefore fearful and anxious about posting to their online learning forum. This led us to argue for a stronger focus on supporting students in the development of confidence in online communication skills by preparing them for entering such contexts (Griffin and Roy,2019). We created resources designed to avoid the challenges that forum activities can present, sharing student perspectives on these which we gathered via informal feedback. Our findings informed the publication of a course entitled ‘Building confidence in using online forums (The Open University,2020) available on the free OpenLearn global platform. We have also produced Working with Online Forums: a Guide for Tutors, written with input from OU tutors and three OU students from three different Faculties. In this chapter, we explain how we implemented our research findings to respond to the needs of anxious learners. We show how the student voice, as well as the tutor voice, informed our resources. The OpenLearn course offers an inclusive approach to online asynchronous pedagogy and, in explaining how we developed the course, we show how education practitioners can develop more inclusive online pedagogy to engage, support and better prepare fearful and anxious users of online learning forums. Finally, we share two examples of how we are working to retain students as active users of forums and reduce anxiety about writing in forums. Through informal feedback, we sought student perspectives of forum activities which are designed to avoid the challenges of finding the ‘right’ academic register for a forum post at an early stage. These activities utilise video and images to encourage all users to post about significant positive events in their lives and share their experiences.