Engaging in Discussions

When teaching in an online and blended environment, asynchronous discussions are a good way to keep your learners actively engaged in the learning process. However, discussions can also be a burden for students, especially if they are over-used in a course and if your students are taking multiple online courses. 'Discussion fatigue' is an online course syndrome caused by too many discussion forums in a course with minimum posting requirements. In these cases, the result you get is that learners become passively engaged and make postings because they have to, especially if the discussion mark counts towards the final grade.

So what is too much? Well, like in any teaching and learning, there is no right or wrong answer. It depends on the course design, the course content (sometimes courses are taught based on discussions) and on the learner circumstances (if you know that your learners are enrolled in a full-time program of study, perhaps it may be best to check on the participation requirements of other courses and keep the requirements for your own course in check). Having said this, a good rule of thumb is to make sure that you keep your students engaged by having them come to the course site to participate at least every two weeks. So, in a 10 week course you may have four or five discussions.

Keeping Learners Engaged

Here are a few strategies that you can use to keep your students engaged in the discussion activities:

Use students to lead the discussion:

• Have students synthesize the weekly postings.
• Have students suggest a relevant topic discussion and let them moderate. Students may submit one question to you via e-mail for consideration. You select the question that is most relevant and have the student who submitted the question be the moderator for that discussion.
• Assign a group to be the experts on a topic or section. Have them post a question for discussion and lead the discussion. Toward the end of the class discussion, have the discussion leaders summarize and combine points for their classmates.

Promote interaction:

• Create debates by having students take sides on an issue and defend their positions. In blended environments you may poll students in class on a particular topic. Then you can have students support their positions in the online discussion area.
• Post a number of questions relating to a course topic. Assign students to work in small groups on these questions. Each group will then post their final results to the discussion.
• In blended environments, post a discussion question related to course readings prior to the in-class discussion. You can use comments from the online discussion to generate in-class discussion. This will help students prepare for the face-to-face discussion.

Regardless of how engaged students are, make sure that you always post a summary or conclusion to the discussion thread, and remember that this can take the form of homework for students!