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Teaching

Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

May 18, 2023
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From: Beckie Supiano

Subject: Teaching: How to create livelier asynchronous discussions

This week I:

  • Share a rundown on how to create a successful discussion board, written by our colleague Luna Laliberte, who learned about it at a recent conference.
  • Remind you of several opportunities to share your experiences, recommendations, and ideas with us.
  • Link to some recent teaching coverage that you may have missed.

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This week I:

  • Share a rundown on how to create a successful discussion board, written by our colleague Luna Laliberte, who learned about it at a recent conference.
  • Remind you of several opportunities to share your experiences, recommendations, and ideas with us.
  • Link to some recent teaching coverage that you may have missed.

The following article was written by our colleague Luna Laliberte, The Chronicle’s editorial events coordinator, who researched remote learning and online instruction as part of her Master’s in Communication and Media program.

Let’s discuss

Discussion boards are now fully integrated into most online courses. Done well, they help students deepen their knowledge and build community. But often online discussions get stuck at the level of sharing information, without analysis or critical thinking, and students dismiss posting replies as meaningless busywork. So, how can instructors make online written discussions more engaging?

I was excited to come across a virtual session delving into that question at the Online Learning Consortium’s Innovate 2023 conference, which I attended in April. Instructional designers Laurie Berry and Kristin Kowal, from the University of Wisconsin Extended Campus, researched role-play in online discussion boards and developed a framework they feel can elevate student engagement beyond info-dumping. They demonstrated how to implement each step by switching between the roles of student and facilitator. Here’s their five-step guide to improving asynchronous discussions.

Provide clear expectations. Without a solid understanding of what they need to do, students may default to answering the prompt without engaging classmates or class concepts. So instructors should lay out their expectations of student participation early on. In other words, if you want students to respond to each other’s comments and ask questions, say so.

Encourage students to share their thought process. Student responses can include explanations of how they developed their answer as a way of showing their work. Sharing their thoughts also encourages students to explicitly detail their assumptions, explain why they think ideas are related, and perhaps deepen their understanding of a concept.

Invite students to add questions in their replies. Questions invite answers, and answers can become entire conversations. By simply adding a few questions to their reply, students open the door to deepening the discussion. Someone who may have otherwise stayed silent may feel compelled to share.

Require students to weave in researched evidence. Supporting conclusions with evidence is one of the most essential critical-thinking skills. Instructors can ask students to weave evidence into their response instead of simply citing links. This challenges students to think critically about how and why they source their information, and may prompt them to integrate course materials into their analysis.

Ask students to include reflection. Ask students how they believe they performed. Did they try their best? Did they contribute something meaningful to the conversation? By adding reflections to their discussions, students can think back on what they learned, what they found useful, and how this new knowledge can be incorporated into their lives.

Berry and Kowal provided examples of instructors implementing only one or two steps into their discussion rubrics and still seeing some positive changes. At the end of their presentation, they asked viewers to write in the chat which steps they would try for their class. Answers flew in so fast that Berry couldn’t read them all. “I don’t know if we have [one step as a] winner over all of them, but it’s so exciting to see people thinking to try some of these,” she said.

Do you use discussion boards in your class? Have you found other strategies that work well for making them engaging? If you don’t use discussion boards, do these ideas resonate with any other ways in which students participate in your online course? Write to me at luna.laliberte@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.

Talk to us

We’re currently seeking reader input on several fronts:

  • Have state efforts to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion affected your classroom approach or conversations with students? Tell us here (we will not quote you without explicit permission).
  • Is there a book that’s helped you become a better instructor that you’d recommend to our readers? Share it here.
  • Are there teaching challenges or innovations you’d like to see us cover? Let us know here.

Thanks everyone who’s added responses to these Google forms, or responded by email to the questions we often pose in the newsletter. Your responses enrich our reporting, and we appreciate them.

ICYMI


  • The real problem with ChatGPT? “The ideas on the paper can be computer-generated while the prose can be the student’s own,” argues Owen Kichizo Terry, a student, in a recent essay for The Chronicle Review.
  • Jennie Young lays out 10 ways that ChatGPT will enhance the teaching of writing in an opinion article for Inside Higher Ed.
  • Professors’ well-being creates conditions for students’ well-being, argues Sarah Rose Cavanagh in a recent advice piece for The Chronicle.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

—Beckie

Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.

Beckie Supiano
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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