Continuance and Staying Power
A “part deux,” if you will. Partie deux for the purists among you.
Academe (where a weathered historian shares)
Cultivating Online Discussion
Knowing not when to stop, I say, let’s keep talking about asynchronous and written online discussion. It makes sense to me to talk next about how to cultivate discussion online. I think one of the most surprising things I’ve learned over the years is how much time it takes to engage in an online discussion. It takes real reading and writing skills to read someone’s post carefully, understand it, and to respond to it. Anyone who engages in an online discussion well is using real skills to participate.
Tip #1: Prime the well.
If I were to walk up to a student and ask them, “what did you think of the assigned reading?” or “what did you get out of the assigned reading?” they’d probably tell me how easy or how difficult the reading was, or at least that’s been my general experience. The writing style of the assigned reading is not completely irrelevant, but it’s not a discussion of history.
To elicit a little more depth on the content of the reading, other activities can prime the well. I’m partial to quizzes. Quizzes as teaching tools, not tests. In my first year in the wilds of undergraduate teaching after grad school, a student came up to me after an exam and told me, “That was a good exam. I learned a lot from the test questions, even the multiple choice ones.” It sounds like I’m making this up, but it’s true. It planted a seed for me.
A quiz gives immediate feedback, a principle that online instructional designers agree is extremely beneficial to learning. The quicker a student can know if they got this or that right or wrong, the more likely they will retain the right information. There are many other ways to prime the well, and online activities to stimulate comprehension would be a good future topic for this newsletter.
Tip #2: Get out of the way.
A watched plant won’t grow. Wait, that’s not quite right.
Try to let the students have some space to grow their own conversation organically. Go ahead and watch if you must, but try not to interfere much. Students can respond to each other with thoughtful agreement, challenges, and questions. Here’s how I explain it in my course doc on participation:
“The second post is to be a response to another student’s post. Why? Because discussion is a conversation, not a series of blurbs, and discussion is the place to improve understanding by exploring ideas, making ‘mistakes,’ and re-thinking ideas, not a place for simple declarations. I encourage you to respond to each other as often as possible and especially if someone else has already touched on a topic you want to write about.”1
I also provide, in the same course doc, an example of an excellent first post and reply (second) post from a long-ago semester (with permission, naturally). The technique, if I can call it that, is to set up expectations as clearly as possible in advance of discussion and then to get out of the way for a bit to let them figure out how to do it in response to a specific discussion prompt.
Tip #3: Give feedback.
When the crop can stand on its own, let’s say is about “knee-high,” I’ll start to respond to the conversation. Sometimes it’s necessary to interject in a thread that has started to drift or maybe it’s okay to just let the thread go and whither on its own. I try not to interject too many times but when I do, I try to focus on the positive — when I see a thread that is thriving and sprouting interesting ideas, I jump in to praise and to ask questions. Give the discussion both sunshine and water.
General feedback
It may surprise to hear that it’s not fruitful to respond to every post. Here’s what tends to happen in the physical classroom: one student offers a thought, the instructor responds and calls on the next student. Every once in a while a student will respond directly to another student. It is a rarity. But it is the goal in online discussion. So I don’t respond to every post in the discussion board.
Instead, I’ve taken to writing a single response to the whole conversation, making my own points in response to the discussion prompt and giving “shout-outs” to some students’ posts that help develop or complicate those points. Is it modeling? A bit. I think of it more as bringing the participants together into one moment (I suspect students are more likely to read the post from the instructor than to try to read all students’ posts) to see where the conservation has gotten us.
A tricky part is correcting course (no pun intended…no, no, pun was intended). Nothing more annoying than crop rows off-kilter. Well, maybe more annoying are vague allusions to something being off-course but no specifics on what or how so. (Who doesn’t get annoyed when a supervisor alludes vaguely to something going wrong in the workplace because they don’t want to take the individual aside and let them know?) I find the most common course correction needed is a reminder that we’re here to talk about a specific time period in history in a specific geographical area; in other words, a reminder to discuss the reading(s) we have in common.
Individual feedback
I do respond to every individual student in the grade book. I usually reflect back to the student what their post’s main points were, because maybe they thought they were being crystal clear but in fact, well, they weren’t, or maybe they don’t realize how cleverly they had combined ideas.
Acknowledging the skills the students have demonstrated in their posts is one way to give encouragement. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and sometimes they don’t realize what their strengths are. Pointing out to a student that they did a great job of summarizing the reading’s main idea in their own words could be a moment when a seed germinates in that student’s mind: “hey, I can identify the heart of the matter well!” Not everyone can and a little kudos can go a long way. A recommended way they can improve in future discussions concludes my individual feedback to students. Harvest some seeds for the next crop.
A score or a grade is also feedback and so grading and giving feedback would, too, be a good future topic for this newsletter.
It seems like we’ve only barely begun plowing the field. Has this cultivated some thoughts for you? Then comment!
With Critters, It’s Personal
Proof that bees have a sense of humor! This bee is pretending to be a cartoon bee with yellow antennae.
Next week: toad drama begins!
From "Assignment: Participation in Discussions,” one of my course documents for HIST 357: Gender in Early Modern Europe.