Yes,yes

A Game-Changer in Accountability: Using Online Discussion Boards (Even in Face-to-Face Classes)

The game-changer has been the online discussion board.
My first lecture of the week is on a Tuesday, and most of the reading is assigned for that class. Thirty-six hours before class, the students must respond to a prompt about the reading—one that is impossible to respond to coherently without having done the reading. Settings allow you to prevent them from seeing other students’ responses until after they post. Then, they have until the beginning of class to respond to a classmate.
If students post, they get credit; if not, they don’t. Literally (and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense in which it actually meant “literally” rather than the modern sense in which it seems to mean “not literally”), if they submit a paragraph of nonsense, they’ll get credit. But they don’t. Their writing is public to me and their peers, and they don’t want to be embarrassed.

Works well. Delong does a bi of this informally on his blog, "Reality and a Bunch of Fingers"

Have less large lectures, may two or three, and use the recovered time for infrequent seminars, each seminar prep happen on the boards. I can improve it.



Take a board, like Thoma, Economist View, and maintain that board through the lesson sequence, and each student gets a a formal link to their theory page, which they must maintain. As the students read and comment on the reading links, then other students can critique their response against their current theory link, forcing reconciliation when the class progresses.

Let them pick a favorite theory or theme, a prior. Then no matter what, they are forced to modify their prior,  as the class material inevitably creates contradiction.