Thursday, September 10, 2009

Enhancing online discussions - some ideas from the blogosphere...



Good afternoon. I thought you may be interested in this blog post about encouraging learners to 'talk' in online discussion forums. It is entitled "Say what? Promoting discussion in online courses", and has some interesting tips and wrinkles.

The introduction from the blog post is as follows: "How can we get learners to talk in online discussions, and how can we get the chatty students to shut up? The results have been pretty disappointing so far. Most instructors set up a discussion forum, and ask students to post an original post and to comment on two other posts. But instructors complain that students are doing the minimum and the discussions aren’t exciting. But what are they assessing? They’re just counting how many posts each student gives. The discussions, hence, are seen as tedious busywork."

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