213 Effective Online Discussions – 02.06.2020

On February 6, 2020, participants in the Active Teaching Lab addressed the challenges faced with online discussions even though they are structured environments for students to reflect on course materials, exchange ideas with peers, and propose their own perspectives. But they often fall flat — why? Below are some of the questions and potential solutions proposed during the Lab.

Takeaways

• Challenge: Lack of visual connections, body language, and gestures inherent in organic face-to-face conversation

• • Possible solution: encourage students to post video messages, allow “liking,” (only for those grading or for everyone)
    Case (2012) studies the potential for audio posting parallel to text posts with inconclusive results, even though “posts were shorter in the written condition, they contained higher levels of content quality […] Spoken comments also contained more social content…that were less common in the written posts.”

• Challenge: Inability for self correction causes students to self-censor

• • Possible solution: allow students to edit and delete their own posts 

• Challenge: Ease of identifying or following a discussion matching students’ interests

• • Possible solution: allow students to create their own discussion threads

To learn more and discover new resources, visit the session’s activity sheet.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Thursdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

Sign up for regular Lab announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.