Knowledge Exchange: A Discussion Board System Tailored for Teaching-Learning Settings

Discussion board systems are often used in teaching-learning settings to support discourse between students and instructors. However most existing discussion board systems are generic and built to be used in a variety of domains. They do not cater for the specific needs of teaching-learning settings. One significant shortcoming is that they do not recognize that in a teaching-learning setting there are two distinct and very different types of discussions namely, instructor-student discussions and studentstudent discussions. In this paper we review some of such existing discussion board systems. We then introduce and examine Knowledge Exchange, a new discussion board system that we have developed. Knowledge Exchange incorporates the distinction between instructor-student discussions and studentstudent discussions. The Knowledge Exchange system has been evaluated by a user study, which suggests that students prefer this approach.