Designing Discussions
Welcome to Authentic Discussions! This module explores how to design, facilitate, and assess authentic and relevant discussions. This module is aligned to the core value of Empowering Student Learning from the Teaching Excellence Framework.
What does it mean to Empower Student Learning?
We foster inclusive and supportive learning environments where every student feels empowered, valued, engaged, and motivated. Our faculty cultivates a culture of empowerment by engaging respectfully and cooperatively with students, incorporating their feedback to motivate and support everyone. We prioritize mentoring, guiding students through academic and personal challenges, and fostering their growth through tailored support and encouragement. We create effective presentations tailored to the intended audience using various styles and organization to communicate with clarity and integrity. This approach not only enhances learning but also ensures that all messaging is delivered with the utmost respect for our student body.
Objectives
After you’ve completed this module, you will be able to:
- Design an authentic and relevant discussion activity
- Apply facilitation techniques for discussion
- Assess discussions
Reflect
Before starting this module, take a moment to reflect on your experience designing and facilitating discussions. Record your thoughts in your journal or online notebook.
What challenges have you encountered with discussions? What has worked well?
Designing Discussions
The first section of this module will explore how to design discussion activities that are engaging, complex, and facilitate higher levels of cognitive presence on Bloom’s taxonomy. We’ll examine a variety of discussion activities, including case studies, role-plays, debates, and peer review.
Online discussions are similar to face-to-face discussions in that they are designed to help students build a sense of community so that they can process course content and build new knowledge. Boettcher and Conrad (2010) state that online discussions provide an “expressive space for learners to process, analyze, and make connections among ideas” (pg. 85). The implementation of a discussion board is an active learning strategy and requires that learners engage with the content through reading, reflection, and each other as part of the learning process.
Discussions and the Community of Inquiry
As you will recall from the Student Engagement module, the connections and structure of an online course are often based upon the Community of Inquiry framework, which identifies the social, cognitive, and teaching factors that shape how people learn in an online setting. Specifically, the framework looks at how learners actively engage with the instructor, other learners, and content to construct meaningful learning. Though this framework focuses on online courses, its tenets can be applied to face-to-face and synchronous courses as well.
Moore (1989) described three types of interactions that would be necessary to include in online courses:
- learner to instructor
- learner to content
- learner to learner
Discussions provide an excellent opportunity for members of a community to establish each type of presence and interaction in an online course.
Click on the plus signs in the graphic to review each type of presence and interaction and learn how it might be established and maintained through discussions.
Designing discussions
According to Garrison & Arbaugh (2007), “When a discussion progresses from the identification of an issue (triggering event), to an exchange of ideas or information about the issue (exploration), to the connection of ideas (integration), and finally to an application of the new ideas to other contexts (resolution), it is said that the discussion has reached a high level of cognitive presence.”
You might have experienced an online discussion that failed to achieve much depth. Though facilitation and participation play a key role in the depth of a discussion and the level of cognitive presence it will achieve, thoughtful design is an essential first step.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
One way to achieve a higher level of cognitive presence in online discussions is to align discussion prompts to upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.
Click on the red plus signs in the graphic to view question stems aligned to each level of Bloom’s.
Increasing cognitive presence in discussions
If you want to achieve higher levels of cognitive presence in discussions, the first step is to develop a strong prompt. Click the Play button to view a video with information about designing an effective discussion prompt.
Types of Discussion Activities
As the video shows, developing an engaging discussion prompt is the first step to an involved discussion. While prompts at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy are an excellent way to engage students, developing other discussion activities including case studies, debates, role-plays, and peer review/feedback can also facilitate higher levels of cognitive presence in online discussions.
Click on the titles in the accordion to learn more about each type of discussion activity.
Explore Samples
Now that you have reviewed the types of discussion activities, please click on the links below to view more information and samples.
Reflect
Now that you have explored various types of discussion activities, take a moment to reflect. Record your thoughts in your journal or online notebook.
What discussion activities might you implement in your course?
How might you use the discussion to help students achieve learning outcomes in your course?
