Your party was going fine until Rocky professed his undying love of Jasamine and began crooning "A Dog in Love". Silence filled the air as people stared at Rocky in confused wonder. As the host, it is your job to get the party back on track and keep the damage to a minimum.
Since the discussion area has become such a standard of the online class, we will cover some of the many ideas of being a good facilitator. (Other tools are below the Discussion section.) Handling your discussions well is one of the most important ways to create community between students. It will take practice to know when to be the leader or authority, and when to let the group lead. You need to create a place for students to share and collaborate equally.
How to Launch and Structure Discussions:
1. One way to encourage students to respond appropriately is to assign them roles for the discussions. Clearly set the expectations for roles such as facilitator, summarizer, devil’s advocate, and seeker. Rotate the roles every week so all need to try on each role.
2. Ask questions that are open ended and use high level reasoning. Some examples include using hypothetical situations or questions that force students to take a stand and defend it.
3. Paraphrase what has been said to make sure you, and others, understand difficult ideas.
4. Stress the idea that you are creating a pool of ideas and thoughts. Once the idea is shared, it is no longer yours. If someone disagrees with the idea it does not mean they do not like the person who shared it.
5. Incorporate role –play, debates, and games into the discussion format.
6. Tie discussions to course events: projects, readings, preparing for an assessment/test...
7. You could have students grade each other with points. Give each student a certain number of points they can award each week or topic. Similar to online shopping reviews, students could give points for inspiration.
8. Limit the number of topics to discuss to two or three at one time. This will encourage students to go more in-depth than they would trying to address many issues.
9. Allow students to choose which topic they want to focus on.
10. Use creative questions that inspire new directions such as “How are computer games like waffles?”
11. Let students know that you will not participate in the discussions the first few days for each new topic. This lets them take the lead without thinking you are not paying attention.
12. Give deadlines for initial posts and a second deadline for responses. Do bear in mind that some students will need longer to post their ideas, either because they did not originally understand the material or because they needed time to reflect.
13. If the class is large, break the discussion areas into groups of five to ten learners per group so everyone gets a chance to contribute.
14. You may need to limit the number of responses and length, per discussion, team members write.
15. Your responses need to be prompt. Students need a sense of immediacy in order to reduce the psychological distance in online classes. Most importantly, your responses to assignments, examinations, projects and questions about the class need to be handled in a timely manner. If you seem not to care about the class the students will wonder why they should care about it.
16. One idea is to have a FAQs page where students can post questions and concerns for all to respond to.
17. Send motivational messages to your students. Some could be at definite sections of your class and would be sent to everyone. Others can be more like greeting cards and are sent to individual students at the instructor’s discretion for things like encouragement, reminders, empathy, advice, and other appropriate areas.
18. If you are teaching different levels of the same subject, the discussion board can be used to create community between the two classes. Allow students who are struggling in the lower level class to post their questions and ask the upper level students to answer them.
Other Tools:
Many web 2.0 tools can be used to help create community between students. Blogs and wikis are both similar to the discussion thread so will not be covered as separate topics. Most of the ideas listed above work well in these platforms. Some tools allow students to meet in groups outside of class, such as Skype, and some offer places for students to share things they have found or made with each other. Teachers can use web 2.0 tools to create simulations, treasure hunts, message boards, guided tours, webzines, enewsletters, interactive puzzles, podcasts, movies and other animations.
Twitter can be used as a type of discussion thread but it also creates a real time atmosphere that can be accessed anywhere and anytime. IM, email, and text messaging can also be used for real time scenarios. A more creative way to use Twitter is to have students follow the tweets that you choose for them. This can be someone already there, such as Pres. Obama, or you can create a character for them to learn about, such as the Athena. A twist of this is to assign your students different characters to be, such as Paul Revere, John Paul Jones and George Washington. Add in media sites like Twitpic and Telly to make things even more meaningful.
Facebook can be used as a tool to enhance your class, sharing photos, stories, documents... or as a platform for the class itself. The following presentation explains some of these uses.
50 Reasons to Invite Facebook into Your ClassroomA good source of web tools for teachers is the wiki
Webtools 4 u 2 use
Remember that your overall goal is to be a facilitator who enables students to share meaning, identify areas of agreement and disagreement, understand each other, and reach consensus about ideas. Always expect the unexpected.
