Rethinking Technical Writing Discussions in Online Asynchronous Classes

It’s that point in class planning where I have great, big, giant goals—but I’m not at all sure that I can design a course to meet them. Zoomed out, the big targets are better discussion posts/student interaction, solutions for group writing that don’t torpedo my teaching evaluations, and assessment and feedback tweaks. None is particularly easy, but I’m giving it a try.

Today, I’m gathering thoughts on discussion posts. I am unendingly done with the whole “post your thoughts and then reply to two classmates.” They never work to create conversations. At best, students may make good observations, but the required interaction is just busy work. They aren’t interacting in thoughtful give-and-take.

SUNY Albany’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Learning, and Online Education has a great article on “Engaging students in structured discussions in an asynchronous course.” The first idea that spoke to me focused on structuring discussion questions for the asynchronous online environment:

Online instructors often express frustration when class discussions quickly devolve into “I agree” or “Good post.” This happens most frequently when we use prompts that are loosely structured (e.g., “What did you feel was the most interesting part of the reading?”) or that ask students to explain course concepts to each other (e.g., “Describe Durkheim’s notion of anomie in your own words and give an example from your own experience”).

In an in-person class, the instructor could use these prompts to move toward more meaningful interaction by asking clarifying questions, comparing students’ responses, or making connections across ideas. [Emphasis mine] Asynchronous online discussions are different because we aren’t there to orchestrate the conversation, and it unfolds over a much longer period of time. Using broad, loosely-structured prompts in that setting typically leads to superficial discussions that flag quickly and don’t have much genuine interaction.

Yes! Yes! Yes! The emphasized passage is absolutely on target. The work we do in a campus classroom doesn’t work in an asynchronous online course. Even if we read and respond to every student post, we can’t interact in the same way that we can in a campus classroom. Instead, we need to guide and build the interactions among students in a structured way.

Applying ideas in a discussion makes a better focus for student conversations. The SUNY Albany article explains:

Instead of asking students to show us what they know about the course content, we need to have them use the course content to take a position, make a decision, solve a problem, analyze a situation, etc. Short cases, scenarios describing real-world situations, or conceptual problems can work very well here because you can ask students to use what they are learning in the course.

In a writing-intensive course, asking students to apply writing strategies they are reading about switches from writing to prove you read the textbook to writing to learn and practice the ideas.

I’ll stop there for now. Next I’ll write about how I hope to make that writing to learn and practice happen.