The (mostly) Asynchronous debate
In my Fall 2020 Introduction to Philosophy course, I wished to do an in-class debate. However, due to restrictions associated with COVID, the traditional in-class debate format would have posed significant problems: many students were taking the course remotely, and I thought it might prove disadvantageous to them to make them debate students who were attending the course in-person. Therefore, I decided to re-work the assignment so that the majority of the debate took place asynchronously. I adapted the debate format from Notre Dame's God and the Good Life debate assignment (1), but instead of the debate taking place live, I asked students to present their initial statements, commentary/rebuttal, and responses as written or audiovisual presentations. The only synchronous portion of the debate was a live Q&A.
The asynchronous debate was, on the whole, successful, with many students expressing their preference for the asynchronous format over live in-class debates, and in particular identifying the debate as the assignment that forced them to master skills of clear argument formulation and presentation. In the future, I would like to experiment with making the entire debate asynchronous by designing a discussion forum in which the Q&A can take place. Fostering enthusiastic student discussion in online, asynchronous class environments has historically been a challenge (2), but I believe that this kind of structure could serve as an effective means of sparking student engagement with each other and the topics of the course.
God and the Good life. GGL Ethics Bowl (Midterm Assignment). University of Notre Dame, 2020. Link.
Lee, Joohi, and Lesisa Martin. "Investigating students’ perceptions of motivating factors of online class discussions." International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning: IRRODL 18.5 (2017): 148-172.
