Online Discussions

The “Online Discussion” is a weekly online discussion related to the topic of the week. There will be two required postings, and then whatever discussion ensues in response.

What: Weekly online discussions with two initial postings and follow up discussion.
Why: The primary goal of these assignments are to get you to think about the material in the readings and lecture, by forcing you to answer questions and have a conversation about it with your classmates.
When: An initial posting is due on Tuesday, responding to the first prompt. A second “thread starting” posting is due on Friday. The discussion will stay open until the following Friday so that you can discuss with your classmates.
How: The discussions will use the Canvas online discussion boards. The class will be divided into groups to make the discussions more manageable.
Assessment: We will give a quantitative grade (not done, unacceptable, acceptable) for each required posting. We will give a qualitative (letter) grade for a group of postings.
Late Policy: You will be penalized if you consistently contribute your postings late. Others need you to make your postings so that they can discuss! Turning in something late (up until the time that the discussion closes) is better than nothing, but is really unfair to the others who you are supposed to be discussing with.
Drop Policy: The lowest two scores (quantitative) will be dropped.

Note that the “Online Discussion” refers to this weekly structured, prompted discussion. There are other online discussions (the Seek and Finds and general discussions on Canvas).

Each week there will be an online discussion related to the topic of the week.

There will be two online prompts. For the first prompt, you should respond based on the initial readings Tuesday (we look at the initial responses to plan for class on Wednesday morning). You cannot discuss (e.g., read and reply) to others until you have made this initial posting.

For the second prompt, you should make another “initial” posting (a posting in response to the prompt, not to some other posting) to the discussion Friday. The second prompt will ask about things in class on Wednesday and the second part of the reading.

Discussion is required and will be part of your assessment. A general rule of thumb is that you should average a minimum of 3 meaningful replies to others as part of a discussion - but the number of postings is less important than the quality of the discussion. Having a thoughtful conversation, or providing insightful feedback too others is valued. We emphasize “on average” - some times you will have more or less to say. Please don’t say redundant things just to get your posting count up.

While adding brief comments to others (like “I agree” or “good posting”) is useful (and you should do it), these don’t count as “meaningful” so you should also make more substantive responses as well. It is useful to acknowledge that you have read responses made to your posting - the Canvas “like” mechanism is a good way to do this. In general, we will use like to acknowledge a post.

Because it’s too hard to have a conversation with the whole class, the class will be broken up into random groups for each assignment. Once we get to steady state for the semester in terms of enrollment, we will hold the groups constant so people can get to know each other, but shuffle them occasionally, so you can meet new people. See Tips on Using Canvas (Canvas Groups) for some tricks.

We will perform quantitative evaluation on your initial postings (for each required posting, 2 per week, we will mark them empty, unacceptable, acceptable). These are subject to the drop 2 policy. We will also perform periodic “qualitative” assessment of your work, looking at the postings over a span of weeks and assigning a grade for the span of weeks. This grade will also consider your discussion beyond the initial postings.