Discussions are the lifeblood of our classrooms; they can be for our virtual classrooms as well. See ideas below.
Discussion Creation
- Make the first discussion post low stakes so students can get used to the LMS technology. Often, this can be an introductory approach; encourage students to practice with including media like photographs.
- Perhaps obvious, but create questions that are open-ended and actually interesting.
- Break students into discussion groups to mimic small group work in the class.
- Give a variety of options for discussion topics.
- Offer optional synchronous discussion sessions as a replacement for online text-based discussion participation.
- Have a due date for the initial post and a separate due date for responses to prevent students from responding to only the first few posts.
- Tell students, clearly, what the learning objectives of online discussions are and how they’ll be graded. Also, establish ground rules and etiquette early on.
- Switch things up: one week, have students have a real-life discussion and report back on it; another, have them role play a certain perspective; another, have them engage in debate; another, give them a “what if…” hypothetical situation to respond to.
Student Participation and Response
- Have students create introductory videos that classmates have to watch. Each video should have x # of views, so direct students to pick those with the least number of views.
- Have students comment on posts with follow-up questions rather than statements.
- Have students respond in a variety of modalities: text, audio, video, image.
- 3CQ: as students respond to each other, they should post a compliment, a comment, a connection, and a question.
- Developed by Jennifer Stewart-Mitchell for K-12, but might still be useful
- Use a jigsaw response, named after Eliot Aronson: find a _____ that no one has found yet; pose a question no one has posed yet, etc. This requires more interaction.
- Encourage students to “like” posts, which will move those posts higher up in the thread.
- Have students respond with “digital powerups” to engage in higher order thinking.
- Have students take turns, individually or in groups, in facilitating the discussion board. They are tasked with responding, making connections, and more.
Instructor Presence
- Respond to discussion board posts strategically and often: clarify ideas, create connections between student responses, summarize ideas.
- Respond to an entire discussion thread with a video: identify themes and repetition and clarify ideas. This prevents you from having to respond to every post and humanizes you.
- Reach out to students via email who don’t respond or respond at the last moment.
- In the first few weeks of the course, provide students with detailed feedback in the gradebook to foster more engagement in their posts and replies.
- Model good comments – and talk about what makes them good.
