Facilitating Discussions

facilitating.png Faculty are greatly encouraged to participate in the online discussions. This helps show the students that the Instructor is engaged and helps to moderate the discussion and ensure it's going in the right direction! 

Below are tips for successfully facilitating online discussions in Canvas:

  • Be present. While you should be posting to the discussion less often as the term progresses, continue to read students’ comments and look for emerging patterns and problems, both with the content being discussed and the groups’ processes/dynamics. You can then post your observations on these issues or bring them into your classroom. Also feel free to stimulate debate, offer ideas, and offer resources (versus answers).
  • Encourage students to respond to each other. Just as in a traditional classroom discussion, students need to be reminded to talk to each other directly, not through you as the instructor. Your decreased presence online should help to encourage this. You can also redirect questions and comments from one student to another.
  • Summarize discussions. Either you or your students need to weave comments together regularly to synthesize the discussion and move it forward. In these comments, you should refer to specific comments made, identify the various points of view, and interpret the main contribution of the discussion. A summary is also an effective way to end a discussion. Several small discussions are more effective than one discussion taken too far.
  • Ensure clear organization of messages. You may need to move a comment from one discussion forum to another if you have multiple discussions or multiple threads running at once. One way to do this is to copy the message and mail it to its author with an explanation of why you are suggesting a move, then delete it from the discussion. This enables the student to easily send the copy to the right discussion forum.
  • Encourage reluctant participants. You can begin this by commenting on participant silence in the general discussion. If this does not increase participation, you may want to communicate one-on-one with the student(s) in question. Try to find out what has been causing their limited participation: is it a technical problem or do they lack confidence in their discussion skills? At minimum, praise their efforts and let them know they are not anonymous in your class. Exchange a few emails until they make a comment that you can suggest they forward to the discussion. While this takes a little more of your time, the students will greatly benefit from the attention.
  • Rein in dominant participants. Again, as with quiet students, consider contacting students who dominate individually to make them aware of the situation and ask them to reflect longer before responding. You could also assign them to be mentors for less vocal students.

Additional Resources

Online Discussions: Tips for Instructors Links to an external site.

Ten Tips for Generating Engaged Online Discussions Links to an external site.