It is important to establish community early in a course by posting guiding and encouraging replies every day in the online discussions (but not more than 25% of the posts) until students understand the process and feel comfortable with your expectations, then participate several times each week so that your posts are about 10-15% of the total number of posts. You don’t want to be the center of attention, but you want to participate in order to:

• Establish a connection with your students

• Encourage students (save evaluations of students’ posts for the gradebook)

• Model higher-order thinking and the use of quotes and references in your post

• Bring new life to the online discussion and keep it from becoming repetitive by:

  • Guiding students to fruitful areas of exploration

  • Asking questions to broaden or deepen the discussion

  • Asking scaffolding questions to probe students’ assumptions, viewpoints, and reasoning

  • Sharing teaching stories (just-in-time-teaching) and your passion for the topic

To encourage students to join in the conversation earlier in the week, you can offer students significant extra points if they make their first post by the midway point of the discussion. For a one-week discussion period, you can require the first post to be made by Wednesday (and then change it to Thursday after the midterm formative evaluation based on student responses). For a 40-point discussion, you can make each post worth 10 points (depending on whether or not they are high-quality posts) and if the first post is made by Wednesday, they receive another 10 points. For a 100-point discussion, you can make each of the posts worth 25 points and students earn an additional 25 points if they post by the initial deadline. This encourages students to read the chapter the weekend before the discussion week instead of the weekend after.

Below are best practices from other authors.

Acolatse (2016) and Curry & Cook (2014) reinforce some of the suggestions made in this sub-module. They strongly suggest that the instructor:

• Provide excellent sample posts that show students how to quote and reference sources correctly and that model higher-levels of critical thinking.

• Clarify expectations: as described in the TILT lesson in Module 6, it is helpful to explain to students what they are expected to do and why.

Bates & Poole (2013)

• Students in online classes can feel isolated – maintain a presence in the online course by actively moderating.

• Support students' construction of knowledge, deepen their comprehension, analyze arguments, think critically, and build community by facilitating the discussion with leading questions, summarizing statements, and acknowledgment of contributions.

• Require students to use or apply assigned readings (evidence-based thinking).

• Discussion group size is optimal at 20-30 students.

• Clarify student expectations (provide rubrics or criteria).

• Encourage students to participate with each other in the discussion and set a positive tone.

• Invite non-participating students to the discussion and help those who are struggling with the material.

• Set netiquette guidelines and don’t allow students to troll or dominate discussion (ask students to practice professional communication).

Graham, et al. (2001)

• Make participation a requirement.

• Grade discussions on quality and participation (process, not results).

• Create purposeful online discussions that will engage learners on an intellectual level.

Jones (2018) recommends requiring students to use original work in the online discussions to:

• Ensure that students are engaging in high-level thinking rather than just copying and pasting.

• Reinforce that academic arguments cannot be based on opinions, they need to understand what they’ve read and need to use paraphrases and cite their work (opinions don’t count, evidence needed).

• Providing students with practice is assembling cogent arguments.

Maintain a cognitive, social, and teaching presence in the online discussions:

• Cognitive: present factual, theoretical and conceptual knowledge; ask scaffolding questions to increase the level of cognitive processing; provide alternate points of view; provoke collegial arguments.

• Social: respond to emotions and maintain cohesion of group. Social presence is communicated via the tone of your posts, who you respond to, and how you respond. Use a conversational style, express emotions, and use teaching stories.

• Teaching: summarize and promote consensus; probe understanding; encourage, acknowledge, and reinforce contributions; identify areas of disagreement; diagnose misperceptions; provide multiple points of view; share your relationship to the material.