Why Students Don’t Use LMS Help Forums, and What It Costs a Course
Most learning management systems, including Canvas and Blackboard, come with a help forum at no extra charge. The idea behind it is a good one: a student posts a question, a classmate or the instructor answers it, and everyone else who was wondering the same thing gets the answer too. In practice, most of these forums sit quiet for the entire semester, and the cost of that silence shows up in places that are easy to overlook.
I’ve taught online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses for nearly a decade, and I see the same pattern every term. In one of my own graduate courses, the built-in forum recorded zero student posts across the whole term, even though every student had access to it. When I looked back at two earlier sections of the same course, the forum had drawn ten viewers and 52 page views between them, and still not a single post or comment.
Most Students Read Help Forums Without Ever Posting
Part of the explanation is simply human behavior. Online communities of all kinds follow a well-documented pattern that the Nielsen Norman Group calls the 90-9-1 rule: roughly 90 percent of members only read, 9 percent contribute occasionally, and about 1 percent create most of the content. Applied to a class of 30, that pattern predicts fewer than one regular poster and only a few occasional contributors, even if the forum worked perfectly. A course forum is starting from a very small base before anything else goes wrong.
Meanwhile, students still need help, and they still want it from people. In Tyton Partners’ Time for Class 2025 report, which surveyed more than 1,500 students and 1,500 instructors in spring 2025, 84 percent of students named people, such as peers and instructors, among the places they prefer to turn when they’re struggling with a concept. Over a third of instructors (38 percent) named disengagement as a top classroom challenge. The demand for human help is clearly there. The forum just isn’t where students go to find it. When a question comes up at 10 p.m. before a deadline, a student is far more likely to email the instructor, text a friend, search the web, or ask a general chatbot, and some say nothing at all and hope it works out.
Students Avoid Help Forums for Reasons That Make Sense
When you talk with students about why they skip the forum, their reasons are understandable. Many feel embarrassed asking a question in front of the whole class, especially one they worry is basic. The Tyton report makes a related point about AI, noting that students may be turning to standalone tools like ChatGPT for questions they view as basic or worry might reflect poorly on them in front of instructors. Nothing in a typical forum rewards a student for helping a classmate, so there’s little reason to check in regularly. Part-time and working students are already juggling jobs, families, and multiple courses, and one more space to remember to visit feels like a chore.
The biggest problem is timing. A question posted into a quiet forum can sit for a day or longer, which is far too long when the assignment is due tomorrow. Once a few questions go unanswered, students learn that the forum doesn’t work and stop checking it, which makes the next question even less likely to get a reply. The cycle reinforces itself until the forum is effectively empty.
Generative AI adds a new layer to this. A student who skips the forum now has an easy alternative in a private chatbot that returns a finished answer in seconds. The student may get unstuck, but nobody else in the class learns from the exchange, and the instructor never finds out that the question came up at all.
An Unused Help Forum Costs More Than It Appears
Because the forum itself is free, its cost is easy to miss, but it shows up in several places. Students who feel stuck and alone are more likely to fall behind, and some eventually withdraw. Others hand in work built on a misunderstanding they never had the chance to clear up, which costs them points and costs the instructor grading time spent on avoidable mistakes.
Faculty feel it in their inboxes. In a typical online course, an instructor can open email on Monday morning to find the same handful of questions asked many different ways, often sent late the night before by students who were stuck and anxious. Each one gets answered individually, in private, when a single shared answer could have helped everyone.
Institutions lose something harder to measure, which is visibility. Tyton found that instructors rely most on their own personal observations to understand student engagement, which is much harder to do in an online course, and that more than a third of introductory course instructors want data on student frustration or confidence that they currently can’t get. A working help forum is one of the few places where that confusion becomes visible while there’s still time to address it. When the forum goes unused, that early signal disappears, even though none of these losses ever appear as a line item in a budget.
Students Use a Help Forum When It Answers Quickly and Feels Like Part of the Course
The goal is a space where asking feels low-risk and where an answer arrives quickly, ideally before the student gives up. In my experience, a few qualities make the biggest difference. The first answer needs to come fast, so a question never sits in silence. Answers should reflect the specific course, including the syllabus, readings, and assignments, so students trust them. The forum should live inside the course itself, with no separate site or login to remember. Questions and answers should be visible to classmates, so a hesitant student can learn by watching someone else ask first. And the instructor needs an easy way to see where students are getting stuck, so patterns show up early.
This is the problem Nuubi is built around. In the graduate course I mentioned earlier, I made Nuubi available from the first week of the term, with no grade attached, no incentives, and no participation requirement. Nineteen of the 29 students engaged with it, generating 208 interactions, and it became the fifth most-used resource in the course, while the built-in forum in that same course again recorded no posts at all. That’s one course, run on an earlier version of the tool, so I hold it loosely, but it’s a striking contrast. You can read the full details, including what we can and can’t claim, in our case study of an optional, ungraded AI forum in a graduate course.
Auditing the Help Forum in Your Course Takes a Few Minutes
If you teach, look at the help forum in one of your courses this term. How many students have posted, how many questions received a useful reply within a day, and how many questions reached you by email instead? If the answers are small, the forum isn’t doing the job it was meant to do, however good the feature looks in the LMS settings.
Nuubi is an AI-integrated tool that gives students a shared course forum where Cuubi offers an immediate first answer grounded in the course materials, classmates learn from each exchange, and faculty stay in the loop on every interaction. If you’d like to see how it works in a real course, you can request a demo. And if you’ve found something else that gets students asking questions in your courses, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.
Sources
Tyton Partners, Time for Class 2025: Empowering Educators, Engaging Students (June 2025): https://4213961.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/4213961/Publications/Time%20for%20Class/Tyton%20Partners_Time%20for%20Class%202025.pdf
J. Nielsen, “The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities,” Nielsen Norman Group, 2006: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/