Students Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Discussion Boards What can we get from our students for a freebie point

In this paper, we investigate how the students think of their experience in a junior (300 level) computer science course that uses blackboard as the underlying course management system. Blackboard’s discussion boards are heavily used for programming project support and to foster cooperation among students to answer their questions/concerns. A survey is conducted through blackboard as a voluntary quiz and the student who participated were given a participation point for their effort. The results and the participation were very interesting. We obtained statistics from the answers to the questions. The students also have given us feedback in the form of comments to all questions except for two only. The students have shown understanding, maturity and willingness to participate in pedagogy-enhancing endeavors with the premise that it might help their education and others’ education as well. Keywordscollaborative learning; cooperative learning; peer learning; teaching evaluation; pedagogy; discussion boards; Blackboard; pedagogy; survey; student feedback.