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Digital Education Studio

Beyond the Icebreaker – Online Discussions

In our September issue last year, we introduced some icebreaker ideas you could use with your students. This September we want to look beyond the icebreaker to how you might help students connect with you and each other throughout the term. In particular, we are going to look at online discussions. Online discussions can be excellent activities to promote learning (Aloni & Harrington, 2018; Covelli, 2017; Levine, 2007) but as Stommel & Morris (2013) highlight no technology has inherent educational value and can be misused just as easily as it can be employed effectively. Below we have outlined a number of key aspects to consider when using online discussions in your teaching:

Make Your Discussions Valuable

For students to engage in online-discussion activities they need to see them as being valuable. But often students don’t understand why they are doing an activity or why it is important (Aloni & Harrington, 2018). As you are using discussion activities try to do the following:

Explain your teaching decisions - It is important to think about online discussions as teaching spaces rather than just facilitation spaces (Bayne et al., 2020); explaining your teaching decisions to your students can promote engagement (Aloni & Harrington, 2018). Why are you asking them to do this activity? How will this help them learn? Is it going to prepare them for an assessment? Etc.

Make it meaningful for all students – it’s important to carefully consider how you write prompts for online discussions. Divergent prompts where there are many right answers can elicit greater engagement whereas convergent fact-based questions – questions with one or two right answers -  tend to shut discussions down (Aloni & Harrington, 2018). Think about what the first student will do in the activity and what the 100th student will do, are their contributions equally valuable?

Valuing Contributions

One reason students don’t engage in online discussion is that they don’t feel their contributions are valued (Armstong 2024, Aloni & Harrington, 2018)
Knowing this it can be tempting to jump in and respond to everyone. However, commenting too much or too soon or providing the wrong comments can have the opposite effect and shut the conversation down (Aloni & Harrington, 2018)

  • Don’t comment too early, give other students time to think and post (Aloni & Harrington, 2018). (A compromise that can prompt more discussion might be to acknowledge the contributions that have already been made but say something  like ‘Great points so far - I’m going to come back to this on Friday when other people have had a chance to contribute.’)
  • Try not to give definitive answers, instead ask them open questions, continuing the conversation (Aloni & Harrington, 2018).
  • Link their post to another student’s and encourage interaction (Levine, 2007).
  • Explain when and how you will comment so students know what to expect (Armstong 2024)

Utilizing group feedback can also be a great way of valuing contributions when you have limited time, but think about calling out specific contributions rather than being completely general.

Pick the Right Format

The format of your forums can have a great effect on how your online discussions develop. Think about the modality, platform and location of your online discussions:

Modality – Not everything has to be text, Audio and video posts in online discussions have the potential to increase feelings of connection and community (Covelli 2017).

Platform – There is no single discussion platform that will work for all activities. Think about the unique attributes of each platform and how it might aid or hinder learning. Padlet for example lets students physically draw lines between posts to connect them which may be useful for some activities, conversely, some platforms hide other responses until students have answered which can be intimidating (Armstrong 2024).

Location - Think about where your online discussions are, Stommel & Morris (2013) highlight the potential benefits of embracing online discussions outside the walled garden of the VLE, such as on social media. They argue this not only helps generate better, more organic forms of community but also allows students to become embedded within wider communities relevant to their subject.

Provide structure

Online discussions can feel difficult, especially when compared to watching a video or reading a book which gives much more of an immediate feeling of learning (Armstong 2024). This makes it important to scaffold these activities. Here are some tips to think about:

  • Start with easier activities and gradually build complexity.
  • Provide clear rules and expectations for how they should engage
  • Modelling – in certain activities, especially at the beginning of a course it can be beneficial to join in the activities yourself.

    Getting started

    As you can see there are a lot of moving parts to consider when planning and teaching through online discussions, but the tips here should help set you up for success. If you want to learn about the technical aspects of the platforms we support you can check out this guide to Padlet or this guide to forums in QMplus.

References

Aloni, M., & Harrington, C. (2018). Research based practices for improving the effectiveness of asynchronous online discussion boards. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 4(4), 271–289. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000121

Armstrong, A. (2024, July 19). Learning from learners: How online discussions become ‘dead spaces’. Online Education. https://onlinelearning.london.ac.uk/2024/07/19/dead-spaces/

Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Macleod, H., O’Shea, C., Ross, J., Sheail, P., Sinclair, C., & Johnston, K. (2020). The Manifesto for Teaching Online. The MIT Press.

Covelli, B. J. (2017). Online Discussion Boards: The Practice of Building Community for Adult Learners. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 65(2), 139–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/07377363.2017.1274616

Levine, S. J. (2007). The online discussion board. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2007(113), 67–74. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.248

Stommel, J., & Morris, S. M. (2013, May 8). The Discussion Forum is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/the-discussion-forum-is-dead-long-live-the-discussion-forum/

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