Back in August I complained about the lack of student discussion in two sparsely-enrolled online graduate courses. I’m now past the mid-point in two other such courses, and I thought I’d post an update.
When teaching online, I frame each week’s discussion around a question that relates to the week’s reading assignments. Now that I explicitly grade the discussions using a feature of the Canvas LMS, I see comments that are much more on point and thoughtful, so to me there is no reason to revert back to the old format in which I really just tallied the number of comments made by each student.
In contrast to the summer courses, I’m getting a lot more discussion. I believe class size is the driving factor, not the season. In my current courses, there are still some students who post comments rarely or not at all, but in absolute terms there are more people in each course who are willing to carry on a conversation — which leads to more conversation.
In the first week of these courses, I did notice what appeared to be an upper bound on class size for productive discussion. Students who commented later in the week repeated ideas that many of their classmates had posted earlier. There is little chance for originality after reading fifteen responses to the same question. I solved this problem by switching on another Canvas feature, “users must post before seeing replies.”