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Ask CTLT

QUESTION: I’m teaching online but am having a difficult time getting students involved in any depth in our online discussions. What suggestions do you have?

ANSWER:
Though we’d love for our students to become instantly and spontaneously engaged in online discussions, the truth is that this rarely happens. If you’d like students to participate actively in discussions, you should build that interaction into the design of your course.

  1. Begin with a fun, low-stakes ice-breaker activity that lets students get to know each other and begins a community-building process. To get the most bang for your buck, the ice-breaker should require students to read and respond to one another’s posts. The book Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson, provides a variety of examples of these types of activities. You might also check out Using Online Icebreakers to Promote Student/Teacher Interaction from the University of South Alabama, which provides online examples and links to other resources. The CTLT Resource Commons also has several other resources for teachers of online courses. Of interest to instructors may be Jonathan Finkelstein’s Learning in Real Time. Synchronous Teaching and Learning Online (2006); Gilly Salmon’s e-tivities: The Key to Active Online Learning (2003); and Tisha Bender’s Discussion-Based Online Teaching to Enhance Student Learning: Theory, Practice, and Assessment (2003).
  2. Provide students guidelines for their interactions:
    1. Include a Netiquette Policy that lays out the types of behaviors you want to encourage and those behaviors that are not acceptable. Though there are many, many good policies out there, one that I like is based on Virginia Shea’s book, Netiquette.
    2. Provide a rubric that addresses your expectations for student participation. (Having this rubric will also help considerably with grading!) Example criteria in your rubric might include: contributes new ideas; provides supportive and constructive feedback; posts within the deadline; uses standard English grammar; shares reflections based on personal experience, etc. Include what’s important to YOU and your course objectives.
  3. Make discussions relevant to students. You’re not sure how the topic is relevant to students? Ask them to tell you! Have students lead the discussions and/or include applications to or examples from their own lives (if and when possible). This strategy also cuts back on students waiting to see what others say before they make a contribution.
  4. Allow students ample time to engage in the discussion and provide timelines for them. You may, for example, require students to post an initial response to a topic/question on Wednesday and have students reply to each other by Sunday. Be sensitive to the asynchronous nature of using a discussion board.
  5. Provide feedback behind the scenes. Allow students the opportunity to answer their own (and each other’s questions). You can always step in to “ask” a question to help students clarify their thinking when necessary. If a student is off track, reply to that student privately (a nice “save face” technique) and allow him or her opportunity to update or respond to his or her own post.
  6. Intervene if needed. If a student violates your netiquette policy, you have at least two options:
    1. Remove the offending post, with a private note to the student detailing how it violates your policy and asking him or her to “reframe and repost”, or
    2. Look at the post as a “teaching moment.”  an opportunity to discuss netiquette and appropriate behavior in the workplace and respond accordingly.