Discover a discussion board strategy that organically encourages students to move beyond simple agreement to critical thinking and synthesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Coming into this semester with little online teaching experience, I knew I wanted to use a weekly discussion system that would be 1) at least a little different from the post and two responses that I have experienced both as faculty and student, 2) something I could implement across my courses, which are at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and 3) a strategy that required engagement with both course content and classmates\u2019 ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New in my role, I was low on time and fully admit that I just wanted something that would be good enough to get me through my first semester. I decided to set up two discussions per week and not require that students reply to one another directly \u2013 trying to avoid multiple versions of \u201cI agree!\u201d. The first post, due by Wednesday night, would be at least 300 words in response to a prompt, which was designed to help students both explore the content in the reading and to apply it to their practice. For the second post, due Friday night, I asked students to, in 150 words or more, write a response that showed that they had read and thought about at least three other students\u2019 posts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is fascinating to see student work based on the simple prompt to \u201cshow that you have read and thought about at least three colleagues\u2019 posts.\u201d Some write three separate short paragraphs responding to three classmates specifically. This is the format I expected. However, more than half of my students write a response that synthesizes their classmates\u2019 ideas. They note trends in the entire class with examples, or present some commonalities and differences between and among multiple classmates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n