Discussion Facilitation

Week 3’s discussion centered around our reading of Tisha Bender’s Discussion-Based Online Teaching to Enhance Student Learning, specifically Chapter 6 about facilitating discussion. It came up in the discussion that many of the groups during the web conference had a lot of “silence.” So most of this week we considered what we could do better for the next conference now that we had some experience. Our Simulations group had a couple of discussions that went well and others we were excited about that did not get any posts for several days.

In our examination of what could be done better, Richard Stewart pointed out some good ideas on how to phrase the starter questions, such as giving a sentence to start. For our Simulations group, this might go something like, “I think simulations are useful for learning because…” So the participant feels more connected to the topic and more compelled to answer, instead of just asking, “Do you think simulations are useful for learning?” Kerry Escobado also brought up the idea of timing for the discussions, which I thought was very useful and something to really consider, especially looking at how the first conference went and what changes need to be made for the 2nd one. This got me thinking about how we could restructure things to make the next conference more successful.

I think my most valuable contribution during this discussion was: “One thing was that we introduced all of our topics at once, and it seemed like people wanted to do just one discussion at a time and in order (although the first discussion continued to get responses all week). Like you both said, maybe it is better to have fewer questions and time them better so participants can get involved. We may also need to rephrase the questions to promote discussion.” It has been very helpful to take a look back at things and get opinions from the rest of the class as to what works and what doesn’t. Issues involving timing, phrasing, quantity, and motivation are all things that we have a little better handle on and can now look at using more effectively.