- Purpose of Discussions. You should use discussions to encourage student interaction, rather than for summarizing or recalling basic information.
- Consider theme-based prompts such as Reflection and Debate.
- Make it enjoyable for everyone. Consider your face-to-face discussions as a model. In class, if you wanted every student to reply to the same prompt, it could get repetitive and become drudgery. Students would run out of things to say. Everyone, including you, could quickly become overwhelmed trying to follow the conversation. As an alternative, consider group-based discussions. Each group could take a turn leading that week's conversation. In this way, each student is participating much less frequently, buy you could expect (and grade) a higher quality "conversation" from the students who are being graded that week.
- Role of Instructor. As the instructor, you could tell students that you are not going to participate unless they need to be redirected. Basically, you could tell students that it's the role of the class to discuss your prompt and you will assess the quality of their efforts to converse about the topic. As the instructor, if you post your thoughts, this may have the effect of ending the conversation as you have posted the "answer."
- Listening looks different online, especially when we engage asynchronously. In a discussion forum, much of our listening becomes invisible. In an on-ground discussion, we might viscerally feel the hum of a room, listening for intake of breath and watching for people leaning forward at the edge of speech. How do we create adequate space for contribution online? How do we reckon with the fact that silence online can often feel a whole lot more … silent?
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In brief, to create a sense of belonging, we must:
• build a community of care
• ask genuine, open-ended questions
• wait for answers
• let conversation wander
• model what it looks like to be wrong and to acknowledge when we’re wrong
• recognize that the right to speak isn't distributed equally
• make listening visible
How to Create Discussion Topics
Your course can have multiple forums and topics, but you must create a forum before you can create a topic since all topics belong to forums. We have create a forum in this Starter course.
- On the navbar, click Discussions.
- On the Discussions List page, from the New button, click New Topic.
- From the drop-down list, select the forum you want to put your topic in.
- To grant everyone access to the topic and restrict learners to only see threads from their own group or section, under Topic Type, select Group or section topic.
Note: You cannot edit the topic type once you save the topic.
- Enter your New Topic Details. This is a good place to provide instructions for your students.
- On the Restrictions tab, select Availability options for your topic. The availability prevents students from viewing topics. We do not recommend that you post an end date for availability.
- Select Locking Options for your topic. Locking a topic prevents users from posting to it until it is unlocked; they can still read post made prior to it being locked, as long as you did not use an Availability end date in step 6.
- Click Save and Close.