Digital education reading group: July 2026
For the July Digital Education Reading Group, I’d like to begin with a provocative proposition about one of online learning’s most familiar features:
Most discussion forums should be killed. The question is, which ones deserve to survive?
Discussion forums have been a part of online learning for more than two decades. They have helped students build communities, discuss ideas, ask questions and receive support from tutors and peers. But as conversational AI becomes more widely used, many of the functions traditionally served by discussion forums can now be provided more quickly and, in some cases, more effectively by AI.
My starting point is deliberately sceptical: many discussion forums are being used for purposes that may now be better served by other tools. The more important question is: which forums deserve to survive and under what conditions?
Beyond “forums versus AI”
Framing the discussion as “forums versus AI” misses the point. The real question is whether a particular activity is achieving something educationally worthwhile and whether a discussion forum is the best way to achieve it. If a forum is mainly being used for routine clarification, generic weekly discussion, tokenistic participation or delayed question-and-answer support, then we should be honest about whether it still earns its place.
A design question
The future of the discussion forum is not guaranteed by tradition. It has to be earned through design. In this session, we will consider whether common forum activities should be killed, kept, redesigned or blended with AI support.
Reading
Rather than selecting a single published article, I have chosen to provide a research synthesis created using ChatGPT Deep Research. I produced the paper by prompting ChatGPT to review and synthesise recent research on asynchronous discussion forums, AI tutors and online learning. The resulting paper is intended as a research-informed discussion paper rather than a peer-reviewed publication.
Asynchronous discussion forums in the age of AI tutors. Internal discussion paper, University of London. Produced using ChatGPT Deep Research.
Join us to consider
Kill, keep or redesign?
- Which existing discussion forum activities no longer serve a meaningful educational purpose and which are still worth keeping?
Public reasoning
- Where do students genuinely need to encounter, use or respond to other students’ thinking?
Blending AI and forums
How might AI and discussion forums work together, with each doing different educational work?
Looking forward to a lively discussion about the future of discussion forums and how AI challenges us to rethink one of online education’s most familiar learning activities.
List of topics discussed at previous meetings
Photo by Omar:. Lopez-Rincon on Unsplash