Throughout the five years of the Designed for Learning program, faculty participants have recounted their experiments with online discussions. Their stories revealed that writing a good prompt and articulating clear guidelines and expectations promotes meaningful and productive dialogue and exchange. Faculty also shared the methods and means they’ve devised for responding to students’ posts and for managing the work entailed in making online discussions a significant component of their curricula. Their suggestions, guidelines and tips are summarized below.
Some Suggestions for Online Discussion Activities
- Using the online environment to continue discussions that started in class provides additional time to develop themes and topics.
- Eliciting students' responses to course material can help them to develop critical reading, writing and thinking skills.
- Posting their own lecture notes enables students to share their understanding with other students, often yielding productive exchanges that deepen that understanding.
- Freewriting (summarizing readings, pre-discussion, etc.) either in class or at home can help students formulate ideas that they later utilize in more in-depth writing. Using freewriting in online discussions is public. Students tend to edit more and look at each other’s posts.
- Asking students to post presentation topics or initial drafts and eliciting feedback from peers and faculty is a dynamic way to guide students as they develop themes into more substantive work.
- Peer-critiquing online helps students to become good readers, writers and editors capable of giving and receiving constructive criticism.
- Teaching students to cite from each other’s work helps them to become more critical readers and careful writers. Students learn they can be resources for each other, and they learn the importance of citation.
- Encouraging students to post reflections, and having students quote from and cite each other’s posts develops students’ ability to evaluate information, think critically and be more thoughtful about their work.
- Separating students into two or more groups and having them take different sides of an issue can foster a fruitful online debate.
- Posting and describing an image to which other students respond generates interesting exchanges and helps students to think critically.
- Eliciting five minute responses to classroom activities (i.e., what did students learn? what are they still having trouble with?) provides a way for faculty to stay in close touch with students.
- Having students post questions prior to exams can help orient review sessions.
- Creating a forum where students can ask and answer each other’s questions will help them to share what they are learning, address problems they may be having in class and can lead to the growth of online study groups.
Suggestions for Developing Good Prompts
- Consider carefully the goal and purpose for the forum. How will students benefit? Will your prompt elicit what you want for the forum?
- Check the vocabulary you are using in the prompt? Is it clear? Concrete?
- Evaluate how the prompt fits into course objectives.
- Think about how you set up the prompt and any pre- and post-activities related to it. If a prompt doesn’t work the way you expected it to the first time, analyze what went wrong, and try it again.
- Try prompts with a personal narrative slant. They can help students relate course material to their lived experience.
- Create prompts that serve as guide questions to help students understand course material.
- Create prompts that do not have one answer, that make students think and analyze.
- Scaffolding assignments and revisiting topics at different times during the semester and with different expectations can help students make the transition to more in-depth writing.
Establish Clear Guidelines
- Require a specified number of threads and postings, and/or set a minimum number of words to ensure substantive responses.
- Require that students respond to students who have not yet received a response.
- Make standards and expectations clear, and adjust them according to your objectives (for example, low vs. high stakes writing, grading).
- Set beginning and ending time limits for those online discussions continued after class.
- Use some class time, or an online discussion, to have students generate guidelines for appropriate language.
- Let students know if participating in the online discussions will constitute a percentage of their grade.
Tips for Managing Online Discussion
- Model effective ways to provide feedback that is nurturing but substantial.
- Be very clear in structuring the activity and the role of online discussion. Don’t assume that students know what you want.
- Make sure you leave enough time for students to complete the task.
- Don’t be too ambitious!
- Try to let students know when you’ll be responding to posts and set time limits.
- Comment on the online postings in class so students know you value what they’ve written.
- Monitor who is not posting, and speak with the student.
- Think about how you want to respond to students’ posts. You don’t have to respond to all students individually; you can summarize, and refer to particular posts in the summary.
- Keep track of whom you include and next time refer to a different set of students.
Thinking about Online Writing
- Assign “buddies” to ensure that all students get responses. Or, tell students that they must make sure that everyone has received at least one response.
- Use groups – they’re good for sharing resources and sometimes having fewer participants in a discussion group can make the exchange more manageable.
- Check the Blackboard statistics page, and think about showing it to students especially if participating in online discussions is a substantial part of their grade.
- To prevent losing work due to system crashes, encourage students to write their responses in a word-processing program and then cut and paste into the Discussion Board.
- Try to prevent frustration with technical glitches by providing students with alternative ways to participate if there’s a problem with the online environment. Tell them to email their post to you, and make sure students have each other’s email addresses. Students will often help each other with technical problems. They might also be able to help write instructions for other students.