E-Learning-Inclusivo (Mashup)

Facilitating discussions between students is one of those things that is infinitely easier when you’re teaching in a physical classroom rather than online. When the students are all in one room, discussions happen more naturally. Facilitating the same type of productive, useful discussion when teaching online is more of a challenge.

Facilitating discussions between students is one of those things that is infinitely easier when you’re teaching in a physical classroom rather than online. When the students are all in one room, discussions happen more naturally. Facilitating the same type of productive, useful discussion when teaching online is more of a challenge.

Photo credit: Improvisation Ability SAK

Sean Morris:

For example, find a way to allow your students to not just create discussions on their own, but to make those discussions not at all peripheral to the main thrust of the learning. Have students decide not what they want to discuss, but what discussions are necessary to the class. And here, I’m not talking about students voting on discussion topics that you create, but creating their own ideas for what can and should be discussed about the subject matter.

Another option: allow students to bring their own materials to bear on the learning. Ask them to write—asynchronously—a collaborative manifesto for the class that supplements (and sometimes overrides) the syllabus. If you’re teaching Moby Dick let them decide how best to embrace the book. Will they write reports, or make papier maché whales? Will they give video presentations, or collaboratively write a comic for the book online? Whatever they come up with, be prepared to invent right alongside them.

Via Fab GOUX-BAUDIMENT

Facilitating discussions between students is one of those things that is infinitely easier when you’re teaching in a physical classroom rather than online. When the students are all in one room, discussions happen more naturally. Facilitating the same type of productive, useful discussion when teaching online is more of a challenge.

Via Peter Mellow

Sharon Thomson:

These online group collaboration tools have enabled smooth and fast communication, collaboration among distantly located students and their instructors. Thus students can gain more from the experience of their instructors. These tools along with instructional design and implementation strategies devised by instructors has led to enhancement of knowledge and sharpening of students’ skills. This has allowed educational benefits to reach to more and more students globally beyond the confines of classrooms

Via Greenwich Connect

Tim Robinson: If our students think that the discussion posting is useless and not at all entertaining. It likely means that it is useless and not at all entertaining. We know this because we often feel the same way when we have to make contrived discussions posts. It’s not that our jobs are about entertaining students, but we do need to do what we can do make it at least tolerable.

 

If we can expand our understanding of the tool to get beyond just ‘discussions’ but see it as a platform for other creative ways to explore a topic, we’ll find a much richer level of learning. We can, maybe, even have some fun with it.

Via Rosemary Tyrrell, Ed.D.