Online Discussions

1. Each week there will be on online thematic discussion, with an initial posting required by Wednesday.
2. Students are required to make an initial posting by the deadline, and encouraged to participate in a conversation online with their group.
3. The discussions will stay open for a week beyond the initial postings so that students can continue the discussions.
4. Initial postings and subsequent discussions will be evaluated separately.

Note that the “Online Discussion” refers to this weekly structured, prompted discussion. There are other online discussions (e.g. Seek and Finds). “Thematic Discussions” is a better term, but a bit of a mouthful.

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

There will be an online prompt that you need to answer. Your groupmates will see this. You cannot discuss (e.g., read and reply) to others until you have made this initial posting. The prompts are designed so that they will hopefully lead to meaningful discussion.

The online discussion prompts are designed to both provoke students to think, but also to be questions where there isn’t necessarily a “right” answer. They are meant to be opportunities for dialog so that students can help each other think through the topic at hand.

The initial posting is due Wednesday of each week. It is important that everyone does it on time, so that others have time to respond.

Evaluation

For evaluation, we will consider the initial posting (every student must do it), and the subsequent discussion separately. Postings will be checked to make sure they are “adequate”. Students who do not turn in all (or almost all) initial postings or are chronically late will be penalized. We may also assess some initial postings more carefully to identify excellent postings that will be rewarded (see Grading and Late Policy).

We understand that not everyone will have something to contribute to every discussion beyond the initial posting. But we expect students to be engaged in the conversation because this is a way to learn and help others learn. You should read everyone elses’ posting. We have no evidence that you do this, so we use the conversation as a crude measure.

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. In the first weeks of class, we will probably re-randomize the groups each week. 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.