This is the first in a series of 4 posts regarding discussions in an online course. These are only my opinions, but I’ve developed them over the course of 12 semesters of online teaching. However, I welcome your thoughts about my posts – do you agree or disagree? What have your experiences been?

The topics I’ll post about are:

• The importance of discussions in online courses
• Increasing sincere participation (by your students) in discussions
• Redirecting discussions – keeping the topic fresh and engaging
• Why use anonymous discussions?

In my opinion, there are two major purposes for using discussions in an online course: connection and transference.

Connection

In the online environment, one of the most noticeable deficiencies is the sense of community that you can get in a traditional classroom. The lack of verbal and visible feedback from your students/classmates can lead to a sense of isolation. Discussions are one way to help alleviate this and help students connect with you and with each other. I’ve found that I learn more about my students from how they participate in discussions than from any other source of input, including email or other direct forms of communication. Of course, this requires an environment that encourages sincere and open participation by the students, which I’ll discuss in my next post.

Transference

The second important consideration, in my opinion, is that engaging students in discussions gives you an opportunity to assist your students in transferring what they are learning in the course to other contexts. Transference of knowledge from one context to another is one of the “holy grails” of education. It does very little good for a student to learn the principles of chemistry or the history of the United States if they lack the ability to transfer the principles and lessons into the context of their life and experiences. Imagine, for example, how terrible it would have been if we hadn’t learned from the long history of Western intervention in the Middle East and applied those lessons to our foreign policy decisions! Oh, wait, that’s a bad example. Anyway, engaging students in discussions about related topics has been shown, at least in some areas of learning, to improve transfer of knowledge to other contexts.

Fostering Transfer of Knowledge in Education Settings. Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Using Online Nominal Group Technique to Implement Knowledge Transfer