Discussion boards, a text-based communication format dating back to the 1970s, is a popular technique to integrate into the classroom. However, anyone who has tried to use these boards in their teaching knows how stilted the conversations become when dealing with unenthusiastic students who are uninterested in impromptu discussions. As an instructor, you’re constantly trying to create prompts that will force a simulacrum of interaction so you can essentially grade bean-counter posts for participation points. Well, this semester, ChatGPT finally killed off my efforts to use these discussion boards in a traditional attempt to simulate the real world. In our classes, students took our prompts, which were intentionally simple in order to encourage one to two paragraph interpersonal exchanges, and dropped them into ChatGPT. They then copied and pasted the results into the discussion boards. Often, I suspect, without even reading them. Several of the posts included admissions that the student was an AI.
