As a current college student, I regularly deal with “required” online discussions. In these discussions, teachers usually provide a prompt and require a certain amount of posts or sentences that a student must write to receive credit before a certain deadline. Often, replying to another student’s post is mandatory. Now that you understand what these typical discussions involve, I’ll go through my thoughts, from a student’s perspective, on how to make them better.
If students don’t know what you’re saying in the question, how can they respond in a thoughtful way? Make sure the student knows where to find information the question asks about. For example: don’t ask an ambiguous question about a particular topic in a reading without backup information. Try to provide the page or chapter number the question involves or post links to online articles. By giving students a clue, they can better review what they’ve learned and develop from there.
Answering a discussion question shouldn’t be about writing the required number of sentences. If students are thinking about word count rather than that topic at hand; doesn’t that defeat the whole point? In my personal experience, trying to hit a word count just facilitates endless drivel. Instead, try to make the requirement something like: Post a thoughtful response with at least three supporting ideas. Sure, it may be harder to grade, but I guarantee such a requirement focuses a student on those supporting thoughts!
Let’s say you’re the standard: Write a post and reply to a post. If so, my job as a student would be to do just that: write a post and reply to one. With this logic, one might be thinking that if all goes well, requiring replies will spark a furious debate and both students get involved in the subject matter! But, my experience proves otherwise. Typically you’ll just get replies without a true discussion.
To avoid this, have more investment. Require a reply to any replies on a discussion post. So, lets say I post my discussion response. Then Jim replies. I’d then have to reply to his comments. Also, if Sue replied to my comment on her post I would have to then re-reply to her. I know this would technically go on forever. But, that’s why you have due dates! As a recap, you now have students consistently discussing until the end of the assignment! Just don’t penalize people if they’ve run out of things to say.
Often, I’ll get to a question, hit on one or two points and then stop writing. What if you had a team of two for one response? You’d get better and more well rounded responses. Also, such a requirement saves time. Why spend more time grading two responses when a better one does the job?
For example, Joe may have forgotten about a point that his partner Jim remembers or vice versa. Now, I realize that there are problems with group work, such as even distribution of work, but for a couple of sentences or paragraphs, it’s hard not to divide group work up pretty evenly.
This post was originally featured on Edudemic and was written by Dylan Schreiner.