Strategies for Online Discussion

General Guidelines

Jennifer H. Herman and Linda B. Nilson's book, Creating Engaging Discussions: Strategies for "Avoiding Crickets" in Any Size Classroom and Online, covers 12 principles of effective discussions:

  1. Students must be prepared for discussion.
  2. Students must feel safe to express themselves. 
  3. Students need good reasons to listen actively. 
  4. Students respond well to a variety of structured discussion formats. 
  5. Students contribute as equally as the discussion structure requires. 
  6. Students respond well to questions with multiple good answers. 
  7. Students benefit from having time to think before contributing. 
  8. Students can benefit from expressing themselves in motion and space. 
  9. Students can benefit from expressing themselves graphically.
  10. Students respond well to novel stimuli, such as outside ideas or research. 
  11. Students participate accordingly to how effectively a discussion is moderated. 
  12. Students must see their personal value as separate from the value of their contributions.

You will notice that the majority of the the principles cover faculty responsibility for preparing students well, constructing an effective discussion space, and for sharing the reasons behind the assignment to support student motivation. A good discussion requires thoughtful preparation and clear faculty involvement from start to finish. This goes against the sort of "set it and forget it" mentality that some faculty have about online discussion boards. If you just open a forum, assign a due date and post a few questions, you might feel like you are done. But, letting things run without checking in again till after the due date assumes that students know how to run a discussion without your guidance. That may or may not be happening. 

 

Connections to the Online Discussion Forum/Board

Some of the principles - like # 7 and #8 - don't apply to online classrooms. Students have a lot of time to read and then think about their responses before posting, and motion and space don't work as well without a physical classroom. So, the online discussion has some significant advantages. 

Several of the principles provide good guidance to online discussion boards. For example, allowing your students a variety or response methods (connected to principles #4 and #9) can engage them more than only allowing typed responses. Let them use Canvas to post voices threads or video comments. Ask them to use Prezi, PowerPoint, or Google Slides to share their ideas in a condensed format or with visuals. Or, take your discussion board off canvas and use something like Padlet (Links to an external site.) to have students build multi-modal responses by building boards with websites, images, video and audio, as well as text (and, it is free!). 

And, #3 focuses on active listening. Perhaps you want to use discussion boards to connect students to each other, or you want to contribute to building a stronger class community through the boards. Whether students are reading, listening, or viewing their peers comments, you need to explain your purpose in asking them to comment on each other's posts. Detail your purpose, describe the benefits, and provide info about how you want them to interact. If you expect more than the "I agree!" or "Nice post!" comments, provide them examples and rubrics with expectations.

See the next page that includes a video specifically about online discussion best practices.  

Some of the principles - like # 7 and #8 - don't apply to online classrooms. Students have a lot of time to read and then think about their responses before posting, and motion and space don't work as well without a physical classroom. So, the online discussion has some significant advantages. 

Several of the principles provide good guidance to online discussion boards. For example, allowing your students a variety or response methods (connected to principles #4 and #9) can engage them more than only allowing typed responses. Let them use Canvas to post voices threads or video comments. Ask them to use Prezi, PowerPoint, or Google Slides to share their ideas in a condensed format or with visuals. Or, take your discussion board off canvas and use something like Padlet (Links to an external site.) to have students build multi-modal responses by building boards with websites, images, video and audio, as well as text (and, it is free!). 

And, #3 focuses on active listening. Perhaps you want to use discussion boards to connect students to each other, or you want to contribute to building a stronger class community through the boards. Whether students are reading, listening, or viewing their peers comments, you need to explain your purpose in asking them to comment on each other's posts. Detail your purpose, describe the benefits, and provide info about how you want them to interact. If you expect more than the "I agree!" or "Nice post!" comments, provide them examples and rubrics with expectations. See the TILT module and Rubrics module for more help in these areas.

Strategies

While most of the principles and ideas that we have covered so far have been broad enough to apply to both on-ground and online discussions, I wanted to dive into online discussion boards/forums more in detail. 

I have done some research about current trends in online discussions, and I share some of the debates and approaches in this short video.