Dear All, I’m planning like many to mix short lectures, short Zoom discussions, and Canvas activities, maybe both blogs and groups discussions. I am wondering if colleagues who have had highly successful Canvas group discussions could suggest methods for making them so. I just got a response to my remote learning survey in which a student expressed pretty much what I myself have felt the few times when I have tried Canvas discussion threads in the past: ” I also find canvas sometimes tedious. Discussion boards can feel forced and unnecessarily “busy” or demanding.” Yes, I often felt students were writing stuff because they had to and not much was getting learned. I don’t have a specific question but a host of them, all very nitty-gritty: What sorts of prompts or questions or guidelines have you found most effective? What different “roles” do you assign the students or different groups of students as posters, respondents, etc., and what kind of guidance do you them? What interventions do you as instructor generally make, if any, in an ongoing discussion thread? Also, what kinds of different set-ups do you use for first years, undergraduate majors, and MA students? In short, I’m looking for any suggestions for what works well! Also, if any of you know sensible online discussions of these issues, please share them. Thanks so much for any suggestions! (Also apologies for an overlong prompt for what I hope will be a productive if not lively discussion thread. 🙂 )
Dispatches from the Foreign Shores of Remote Teaching
Hello Prof. Scodel! I use graded discussions on Canvas for my courses, which are German-language seminars. Students are required to post one question and answer one question for each class meeting. I post my main thematic questions to get things started, or sometimes more detail-oriented questions relating this week to previous course material. The students can post a question if they did not understand some aspect of the text (mostly because they are reading in a foreign language, though perhaps this is still applicable in other situations). Most frequently though students post discussion questions, which address broader themes that they are interested in. Sometimes students can quite comprehensively answer each others’ questions even before class starts. Most often I bring up students’ questions during class discussion and we discuss further. Otherwise, while grading these posts (with the wonders of SpeedGrader) I offer a couple sentences of my thoughts. My grading policy for these posts is just they get the points for completing it on time. In my experience, the students come up with great contributions.
Most effective for this assignment is to include all pertinent directions from the syllabus in the discussion header itself. I usually duplicate discussion assignments, changing the names and due dates. I also include a link to the reading in PDF form in the discussion header, so that the students don’t have to navigate to multiple pages and can use the Canvas system to have an overview of their assignment due dates.
Thanks so much for this! One thing I didn’t frankly understand: “I usually duplicate discussion assignments, changing the names and due dates.” Do you mean that you duplicate the assigment set out in the syllabus when you post the assignment on the Canvas discussion thread? And what do you mean about “changing the names.” Sorry, I’m a slow (remote) learner. 🙂
Sure thing, you are very welcome. In my film course for example, we watch a different film each week and I create a separate discussion for each film. So by duplicating I just meant that rather than create a new discussion from scratch for each week, I duplicate the discussion and then change what I need to. This saves some time because the majority of the instructions on what to do in this discussion assignment and the number of points it is worth stay the same, I just need to change details like the title of the discussion and the due date. It’s just a little faster than copying and pasting instructions into each of the ten discussions that I set up over the quarter. Does that make sense?
If not, here is an article that describes duplicating
https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11793-4152768840
This is more information on creating graded discussions.
https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13962-4152810917
The main reason you want to use graded discussions is so that you can have the SpeedGrader group each of your student’s posts to make them easy to grade:
https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13307-4152801031
Thanks for the clarification and links!