Great Quotes on the Value of Discussions
RE: Assessing Online Asynchronous Discussion in Online Courses: An Empirical Study
Posted: 17-Apr-2007 10:50 AM
Discussion is where class happens! Web pages do not teach. Only by engaging students in discussion can the teaching, facilitating, redirecting, explaining occur.
I have been teaching online since 1992 BW (before the web, when all we had was discussion on BBS (bulletin boards). With the advent of the web, faculty tended to forget about discussion. Yet for me,discussion is the heart of the class - the give and take.
There are many modes of assessment from college rubrics for discussion (Westwood Online) to individual faculty rubrics to checklists of completed or not completed. Individual faculty set their own requirements, just as they would in a f2f classroom. One common theme is the requirement that students not only post responses, but also respond to at least 2 or more other students.
Crafting directions and good discussions questions are essential.
In my first attempts in '92, I assigned 3 discussion questions from the text. Students answered all three questions, which meant that I had 75 messages to read! This was what I said to do, but not what I meant. I then had to go back and teach students how to discuss online.
Lucy MacDonld
Chemeketa Community College
Salem, OR
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.