WHY SHOULD I USE A DISCUSSION BOARD
Online discussions are not unlike those conducted within the traditional, face-to-face classroom, and are often seen as more useful for the distance instructor who does not meet students face-to-face. Even the on-campus instructor may find discussion boards useful, however. A few advantages to using discussion boards include:

• extending the time allotted for discussions beyond regular class time to allow for in-depth reflection on comments
• requiring students to move beyond listening to a lecture, stating their thoughts, engaging in well-articulated argumentation and critical reasoning
• allowing each student to participate and join-in the conversation, rather than one or two outgoing communicators in the classroom
• providing an outlet for students to pose their questions and receive feedback from not only the instructor, but also other discussion board participants
• allowing students to reference and bring external sources of information into the conversation (e.g., "according to this web site...")
• storing a record or archive of conversations for use by future classes, researchers, others
• allowing discussions to include perspectives from individuals outside of the original class (i.e., one engineering class at Virginia Tech, one at Purdue, and one at Georgia Tech, all discussing the same topic, perhaps including two or three professionals working in the field)