Strategies for Engaging Students in Discussion

From: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/online_questions/strategies.html

Use students to lead
Have students synthesize the prior week's responses.

Have students generate discussion or review questions. Students can submit one question to you via e-mail or an ANGEL drop box. Select a few questions and post them to your discussion area. You could even have the students who submitted the question be the moderator for that question.

Assign a group to be the experts on a topic or section. Have them post a question for that week's discussion and lead the discussion. Toward the end of the class discussion, have the discussion leaders summarize and combine points for their classmates.

Have a student start the discussion on a topic or chapter.

Promote interaction

Have students take sides on an issue and defend their positions. Poll students in class or online on a particular question or issue. Then have students support their positions in the threaded discussion area.

Post a number of questions relating to a chapter or unit of study. Have students work in small groups on these questions. Each group will then post their final results to the discussion list.

Guide students

Use online chat to hold a review session.

Post a weekly discussion question related to course readings prior to the in-class discussion. You can use comments from the online discussion to generate in-class discussion. Students will be more prepared for the face-to-face discussion.

Place preview or review questions or concepts in the online discussion area. Have students submit a response in their own words (not a quote from the book). This allows you to see the students' level of understanding.

Have students identify what parts of the assignment are the most confusing to them.

For individual assignments, have students review postings from the discussion fourm and outline the points and themes that were discussed. Select a few good examples and post these for the class.

Post a model answer to the discussion as a conclusion to your discussion thread.