Sorry I’m a bit slow on my posting lately. The past couple of weeks have been crazy busy with grading and business-travel and other things conspiring to use up all my free time. Anyway, here we go with part two of my three-part post on discussions.
When I first started teaching online, I kept getting “dinged” by Quality Assurance for not appropriately “redirecting” my discussions. “Redirecting”? I mean, I was participating and making comments and such, but it wasn’t immediately clear to me what that word meant. With some help from my mentor, it finally clicked for me.
Even if you choose the most exciting and engaging topic possible, as you’ve probably realized in your own classes, the discussion will usually run out of steam in a fairly short period of time; a few days or a week. Most of my discussion topics are set to run for at least two weeks, so this can be a problem. Another problem is that the earliest posters will usually get all the “juice” out of the subject and then everything kind of starts to lag. What do you do then? Trying to flog the original prompt doesn’t work very well (I know from experience), as it usually just generates insincere posts that mostly fill up space. Here are a few things that seem to work pretty well, and if you have any other tricks or techniques that you employ, please share them:
1) Stay involved in the discussion on a daily basis. I know we aren’t required to post daily, but at least read daily and maintain contact with the ebb and flow of ideas. This will offer you your best opportunity to see threads that can be tapped into for fresh directions or ideas, which is the next point.
2) Identify “juicy” posts and use them to push the discussion in a new direction. You know, the posts that students obviously thought about a little more than some of their peers, which offer some fresh ideas that you can work with? For example, in a discussion about uncertainty, precision and accuracy in my chemistry course, one student had this as part of one of her posts: “In working with the state crime lab, I was able to observe the impact of uncertainty in the drug/chemical department, in the fact that something must be tested several times to quantify amounts or even to determine the presence of a substance. If we were to test something inaccurately... it could mean a whole misrepresentation on an outcome of a case.”
State crime lab?! Cool! That led to a side discussion about forensic science that was pretty interesting.
In a discussion about energy use, one of my students asked a question about something he was thinking about purchasing. It was a fuel efficiency product for his car called “water4gas”, and purported to improve his fuel efficiency by a ridiculous amount. This was an opportunity to discuss the importance of really understanding the laws of thermodynamics and their implications in our daily lives and (hopefully) he was saved the expense of buying into this scam.
3) Ask them to think more deeply about the original topic, or about a related idea. After most of the important ideas related to the original discussion prompt have been tossed about, sometimes there’s no obvious direction to take the discussion. That may call for what is essentially a new discussion prompt. For example, one time my class was discussing what manufacturers might mean by advertising their products as “chemical free”. Within a few days, we had pretty much wrung this out by covering the ideas that all products are made up of chemicals and if something were truly “chemical free” it wouldn’t exist and probably the manufacturers were trying to portray their product as benign or harmless. OK, so where do we go from there? Well, I happened to see a news story about how some people were trying to get bis-phenol A (BPA that’s found in many plastic products) classified as a “toxic chemical”. So, I saw this as an opportunity to bring up the related question: “What do you think they mean by "toxic chemical"? What chemicals do you think of when you think about non-toxic chemicals? How are toxic and non-toxic chemicals differentiated?” This started a new line of comments and ideas that got the conversation going again.
As fun and interesting as discussions can be, however, you’ll always have students who won’t want to participate for various reasons. Next time, I’ll share some of my observations about the usefulness of anonymous discussions, which can be an avenue to help students get more out of your course.
