Teaching Tip: Timing student discussions

July 8, 2014

Marissa Carl

Students need time to absorb your course materials, lectures, readings and content. They need even more time for their ideas to germinate and grow on that content before they put them out for display. Then, rather than students offering their ideas and arguments sporadically and intermittently, delineating the temporal boundaries of the presentation adds even more energy to the interaction.

Time to Think

One simple pattern for an online asynchronous discussion cycle is to have written responses to your discussion prompt due by the end of the day on Tuesday, then allowing students to discuss one another’s written responses Wednesday through Friday. This cycle gives the students Saturday through Tuesday to consume course content and develop their ideas. It also gives you, the instructor, an opportunity to read through student discussions and post a wrap-up at the end of the discussion. Saturday morning works well for a wrap-up, but anytime over the weekend is sufficiently timely.

Results

These sorts of temporal boundaries focus the student experience and set expectations with regard to response participation. If the time window for initial posts and responses is too broad, it becomes like a painful dinner party with lots of awkward silences. Channeling the conversations of 20 to 30 students, even asynchronously, into three days of interaction should have the forums bursting with substantive interaction.

Read about timing discussion in face-to-face courses on iTeachU.

-- Teaching Tip by Owen Guthrie, UAF eLearning instructional designer

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1, about prompts, here.