Discussions.
Discussion forums both make and break online courses.
Discussion forums are the bread and butter of online courses.
They're the most common tool in the online instructor's toolkit because they come closest to replacing the beloved "classroom discussions" of higher education. Putting aside the fact that many classroom courses do not really have full-throated discussions to begin with (for reasons as diverse as size of the course, the physical environment of the course, and even the content of the course), since the time of Plato's transcriptions of Socrates' dialogues with his lads/learners, engaged discussion has been seen as a key teaching and learning strategy. Online written discussion forums provide every student with opportunities to participate in discussions that otherwise wouldn’t be able to take place.
Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash
But therein lies a problem. Online courses actually have more discussions than a typical classroom course. These won’t always be with the prof - written discussion forums are easily structured so that all students can discuss in groups, something that isn’t as easy to orchestrate in a classroom. Plus, unlike a classroom, you have record of everything that students say. There’s a sense that, if the students have produced something, it should be read.
The problem with online courses isn’t that they don’t afford interactive engagement opportunities, it’s that they do - too many of them! For instructors this leads to real headaches, as noted in this article by Mark Lieberman. The format creates a whole series of considerations with regard to marking the posts, which requires more time and effort. Just keeping up with all the posts in large courses requires time and effort, and some instructors balk at the idea of trying to read and grade posts in large classes.
What to do, what to do. As is so often the case, we lose sight of the real problem when attempting to solve the obvious problem. Discussion forums generate more activity, so instructors and educational developers spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways of reducing the impact on instructor workload. Peer assessment of discussions is often suggested, as is having groups summarize their discussions so that instructors only need to read summaries. One of the scariest solutions mentioned in the Lieberman article is the research being done by companies like Blackboard to develop “algorithms that can assess the level of critical thinking that students use when answering questions. Instructors can receive readouts that help inform the grades they assign.” AI grading to the rescue!
The real problem, in case it hasn’t hit you square across the face yet, is that our courses are too big for meaningful instructor feedback on student participation and thinking. Solutions like Blackboard’s only serve to further separate the instructor from student work while maintaining the status quo of large class size. This is the great irony of online instruction: it encourages greater student engagement which, thanks to the mass instruction model of modern higher education, requires instructors to find ways around actually engaging with the students’ engagement. This is not the way to proceed.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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