Hallo, This is Bin Song from Philosophy and Religion at Washington College!

Thanks for Meghan and CTL to invite me to talk about my experience to organize online discussions.

I have one formal way, and another informal way to do it.

In the fall of 2019, I taught the course ‘comparative religion: eastern’, and designed two assignments which are very conducive to online discussion. And these two assignments are actually combined.

The titles of the assignments are called, for one, “reflection essayist and discussion leader,” for another, “quote and discussion.”

The general idea for “reflection essayist and discussion leader” is that each student needs to write one reflection essay about one assigned reading, post it in the discussion board of canvas. So, in the screenshot of the discussion board as an example, you can see it is Allison who posts her essay, and every other student needs to comment upon it in the format of “quote and discussion.” In other words, they need to quote words from the submitted essay, present their interpretation, and ask questions. What the essayist needs to do is to gather all views and opinions from these discussions, bring them into the classroom, and then lead the discussion for about 40 minutes. My role is to facilitate each step of this combined assignment. Sometimes students choose to answer their peers’ questions online in advance, like what Allison did, but this is not required. If there are some concepts which I think students need to know before the discussion, I will respond to their discussions in detail in the online form.

As indicated by the screenshot, the discussion is very robust.

For grading, for the student who writes the essay and leads the discussion, each of these two parts takes half of their final score on this particular assignment. The essay will be graded as a paper, and the leading of the discussion will be graded as a presentation. For all the “quote and discussions”, they will be just checked or unchecked, no particular score attached.

For the informal part of online discussion, which happens a lot in the past spring, I can give some tips about how to organize it using an example in the course of “Modern Philosophy.” I describe it as informal because no particular assignment is required for online discussion. But my general teaching in the spring is to combine synchronous and asynchronous teachings. So each week, I will assign a reading with a list of guiding questions, and then, I will post short videos to explain what I think need to clarify about the assigned reading. In the following, I will encourage students to discuss these short videos in the discussion board of canvas. Finally, on Thursday, we will divide students into manageable sizes of groups, and then, hold a virtual meeting with them, to continue to answer their questions or discuss issues raised in the discussion board.

As indicated by the screen shot, students in the class are indeed very dedicated to online discussion. I think if you ask tips, I can enumerate the following points, but they are definitely not exhaustive. And I believe some of my colleagues may have better ways to do this, but I will tell my own here:

(1) Online discussion is an extension of discussion in the classroom. In spring, whether students want to speak online rests upon their physical discussion experience in the classroom. So there are some normal standards for eliciting discussion such as: asking good questions, listening to each individual, tailoring your answers to each question and each student, being open to diverse views among students, be ready to change your own view when conversing with students, etc. You know, all these principles apply in an online environment, and among all of these, I feel the most important is to have students really feel safe, included, and will be surely benefited when they speak up. So, I would say this is a culture of liberal arts to nurture in one’s teaching, and if nurtured well, it will extend naturally to an online environment.

(2) As for online discussion per se, I think I answer the questions of students in an extra detailed way. This is because the answer to each question is visible to all students. And if you answer one question sufficiently well, other students will learn quite a lot from it. As indicated by the screenshot, sometimes this requires several rounds of discussion, because when I answer questions, I always try to, firstly, clarify what the students mean, and secondly, confirm whether my answer has addressed their issues. And I also like to connect students to each other when I address their questions. For instance, I will say, Peter’s question is relevant to the one asked by Holly. Quite often, these students can form a learning group because of this connection.

Ok, that’s all, I hope this is helpful, and would like to learn from you if you have your own way to do online discussions. Thanks!