If you have ever taught (or taken) an online class, you may have fallen into the trap of boring online discussions. You know what I am talking about. These are the kind of discussions where students do the bare minimum. You can tell that they’re
“Are those handouts for us?” my student asked, gesturing toward the copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 that I’d carried into class. “Nope,” I replied. “They’re for the Brit lit class that I teach after yours.” “Oh, OK.” he said, disappointedly.
Current global events, including a rise in nationalistic rhetoric, have put pressure on faculty from all disciplines to be able to facilitate discussions without disenfranchising or excluding any students. I’ve been teaching discussion-based courses for 25 years, and my own methods have evolved and grown,
The ubiquitous cell phone and laptop have made student chat a common part of live classes, much to the consternation of instructors. Not only does it distract the teacher, but studies prove the common-sense intuition that distractions undermine learning (Blasiman et al., 2018). But a
Like so many other professors, I’ve noticed that student engagement is lower now than it was even five years ago. Students are skipping class, skipping assignments, and getting AI to do their reading and writing for them in ever-increasing numbers. When I sign in to
Artificial intelligence is quickly integrating itself into all parts of learning as a tool for both students and faculty. Now it is coming to online discussion in the form of Packback, a tool that integrates into the learning management system
Social annotation tools allow instructors to post a reading to a website and then have students tag it with comments. These provide many benefits for students and instructors. One, they can demonstrate to the instructor that students are reading an article, especially if the
Over the past few years, it has become popular in education to broadcast the “backchannel” to students during a large class through a dedicated Twitter hashtag or some other social media app. The idea is that it allows students to make comments on the
Faculty often use discussion strategies to engage their students and push them into higher levels of learning. But many instructors we have talked to have noticed that discussions can often feel like busywork or small talk. Providing structure is one way to elevate discussions
Discussion forums have brought both promise and disappointment to online educators. They promise to allow all students to lend their voice to a discussion without worry of being interrupted or slowing down the class. But they often degenerate into places where students repeat one
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