My experience is that having a conversation among 65+ people is tricky (even with online forums), so my intent is to divide the class into smaller groups for discussion.
Unfortunately, I failed to set this up correctly for online discussion #2. I apologize.
From a quick skim, it seems like despite having so many people, there has been a lot of meaningful and productive discussion. I appreciate that these things get unwieldy as 60+ people try to talk about everything (especially as the list of contributions grow). Also, there gets to be a lot of redundancy.
In the future, online discussions should be grouped – dividing the class into 8 groups for the weekly “discussion” and 3 groups for the seek and find.
Of course, it could be that you all prefer having one big discussion (now that you’ve tried both). I will probably take a poll in the future to see how people feel.