Online discussion boards often suffer from low participation and surface-level engagement, even when instructors apply best practices in discussion design. Large language models (LLMs), however, were designed to support sustained conversational interaction. This session asks: what happens when students are given the choice between discussions with a LLM or traditional peer-to-peer interaction on a discussion board? Drawing on early experimentation in an online freshman seminar, the session examines unexpected outcomes, student reactions, and lessons learned about the evolving role of discussion boards in the AI era.
