How to Kickstart Online Discussions with your Students

Here, we share some very tactical ways you can get students engaged in your online course…and it all begins with kickstarting those online discussions. We’ll focus on the two key areas of collaboration and connection that are often critical for sparking interaction.

Drive Student Collaboration Online

During collaboration, students receive attention from their peers, which is thought to increase the level of engagement and participation in the learning process. Collaborative learning strategies also enhance students’ academic outcomes.

In a meta-analysis of 1,000+ empirical studies, evidence showed that peer-assisted methods outperformed traditional methods, with small-group collaboration increasing students’ ability to transfer their learning to new contexts. Use these tips to get students collaborating and talking online.

Peer reviews & milestones

Southern Arkansas University Tech uses the learner-centered strategy of peer critiques in online courses, and couples it with opportunities for students to provide feedback anonymously and also work 1-on-1 with each other through virtual chat portals. The idea is to help students strengthen their evaluative skills, practice articulating constructive feedback, and become receptive to feedback.

For example, in an online speech course, students are required to write a narrative outline & speech and submit it for peer critique. Through prompts set by milestones, students are required to provide at least three comments on a number of students’ speeches.

“The feedback students were providing became at least 10 times better, and the number of comments per speech more than doubled. We found that anonymous critiques elicit more constructive feedback, which is helping our students better iterate their work before final submissions and grades,” said instructional designer Traci Rushing.

Students at SAU Tech also participate in 1-on-1 or small-group collaboration projects. That collaboration is powered through chat portals. The key here is the look and feel.

“It looks and feels like text messaging — a familiar medium to students — but rather than taking the students out of the course to a mobile texting app, the portal is connected to the course discussion and material to keep the students engaged.”

“At Tidewater Community College, we’re intentional about enabling collaboration in our online courses. We set in place milestones or checkpoints throughout the course at particular times that require collaborative activities, peer reviews, and comments on other students’ discussion inputs,” Instructional Designer Heather Brown shared.

This approach provides clear instruction and expectation for students who don’t have the advantage of in-class collaboration guidance. It also continues to honor the asynchronous communication needs of most online learners.

“Using milestones to guide our online students through collaborative learning activities is keeping our students engaged and on track, while simultaneously working to create a stronger sense of classroom community. We see our students becoming more responsive to each other, which is creating connection,” said Brown.

Find discussion tools with built-in social annotation

Any technology an institution employs to facilitate online courses must be easy for both faculty and students to use. Tools with user-friendly designs are naturally easier to learn how to use; they also allow instructors and students to complete tasks quickly and offer an intuitive navigation — to even a first-time user. When designed this way, digital learning tools are easier to learn, and that’s critical for better online interactions.

Plus, multimedia-based tools are more likely to elicit student participation. Media is often viewed as a distraction for students, but the reality is that integrating multimedia activities into both online and traditional classes can have an incredible impact on the way students learn. Among other things, it can create context, motivate discussions, and lock in concepts to ultimately enhance a students’ learning experience. Just take social annotation.

In Harmonize’s online discussion platform, students have a social media-like experience, with content creation, sharing, and reaction capabilities — making it both recognizable and easy to use, for students which leads to increased activity and engagement. Harmonize then takes media-based interaction a step further and enables students and instructors alike to provide feedback within images, videos, and other documents — including PDFs — through online annotation tools.

Without social annotation tools, it’s hard for instructors and students to communicate effectively about details in videos or images. Here are just a couple of the benefits of image, video, and text annotation tools for students:

Deeper discussions

When students can leave comments directly on images and videos, they can express themselves more clearly, which can lead to much better discussions. Rather than struggle to describe what they’re talking about in a separate post, students and instructors can collaboratively manipulate images and videos to highlight questions, comments, or insights about specific aspects of the learning material.

Improved retention

Everyone learns differently, but many learners find it easier to retain information they saw or heard than information they read in a long thread of text. Online annotation tools can make it easier for students to retain what they learn in discussions because they can associate the information with the image or video.

These social annotation tools enable an added level of collaboration and interaction online for students.

Connection: Create a Safe Space for Your Online Learners

Whether at work, home, or school, meaningful human connection is powerful. Think about it in terms of work….Would you be surprised to learn that people with friendly connections at work perform better in their job? According to research, people who have a good friend at work are not only more likely to be happier and healthier, but they are also seven times as likely to be engaged in their job. In addition, employees who report having friends at work have higher levels of productivity, retention and job satisfaction than those who don’t.

The same idea of connection applies to online learning. Classroom and online courses can differ drastically in the level of interaction between students and instructors. Distance education and online courses present distinct barriers to traditional student engagement and participation, amplified by the actual distance between the learners, their peers, and the instructor.

As a result, students can experience a growing sense of isolation, which often inhibits connection and participation. To create the conditions that allow for connection online,  work to cultivate a stronger sense of community in your online courses — which, in the end, engages students and makes them more inclined to contribute.

Make it easier to talk about hard topics

Copiah-Lincoln Community College has found success in using emotion-based and real-world applicable discussion prompts in their online discussion tools.

“We put great care into building our discussion prompts for online courses. For example, we’ll use prompts that reference current events and social justice issues to solicit response from students. We found emotion-based responses came out naturally in the discussions,” said Dr. Amanda Hood, Director of eLearning for Copiah-Lincoln.

“This approach to an online discussion board gives students the chance to articulate their opinions, understand competing perspectives, and compose thoughtful responses — similar to a classroom setting. It’s also good practice for figuring out how to resolve conflict and for the interactions they’ll have in the future.”

Be inclusive of different styles of expression

For better engagement, it’s also important to be inclusive of the different ways students communicate.

West Virginia University saw an increase in organic interaction among students in their online courses when it became easier to communicate right from within their online discussion platform.

“Students can submit written responses, create snippets of audio, or make and send videos right from within our online collaboration and online discussion tools. We’re excited about this easy-to-use method for instructors and students to engage with the content and each other,” said Beth Bailey, WVU Instructional Designer.

WVU Instructional Designer Michele Korgeski echoes these sentiments. Harmonize has not only impacted student-to-student interaction, but it has also opened the door for students to interact with their instructors and vice versa.

“Students and instructors can seamlessly carry on rich conversations about any course topic. In the past, this type of interaction was hard to find and often viewed as another graded requirement. With Harmonize, we’re finding there’s less hesitation to respond to someone with video or audio comments. This is resulting in more meaningful and engaging discussions between students and instructors.”

The options for how and in what medium to respond is allowing students to express themselves in their own ways, helping instructors move from transactional to more meaningful exchanges.

Prioritize interaction

Because instruction is delivered asynchronously, and material can be accessed by students at any time, online courses are typically built with one-way, transactional communication in mind — which is unhelpful if we’re looking to spur interactions.

If you want to increase student participation and create better community, consider employing more engaging activities for online classes that drive conversation and use different channels of communication.

“We have our instructors use course Q&A, polls, and enable chat portals for our students.  It’s giving online learners a chance to be seen and heard. It’s also a more inclusive approach to communication, which is creating an online experience more equitable to the classroom experience,” says Andrew Lieb, Collegewide Chair at Eastern Florida State College Online.

Erin Richardson from Meridian Community College agrees that polls have high impact on student engagement. “We have received such positive feedback from students who said they feel more engaged in the course when we use polls. They have a voice and a say in the course decisions that will affect their experience.”

Modern, Interactive Tools for Online Learning

The key to getting students excited to discuss online — and encouraging student participation — is creating a strong sense of community and enabling collaboration. This requires delivering online courses in a way that offers a similar experience as face-to-face classroom learning. To bring online classes closer in feel to the on-campus experience:

• Make it easier to discuss relevant and challenging topics
• Meet students where they are by being inclusive of different learning styles
• Use a video annotation tool and a document and image annotation tool to incorporate more social interaction through feedback
• Create multiple avenues for interaction using polls, Q&A, chat, video, discussion boards
• Facilitate frequent collaboration through peer reviews, 1:1 or group work, and milestones
• Use fully integrated tools that look and feel modern

From communication, collaboration and social engagement, to instructor and peer support on assignments, to feeling a sense of community in online courses, expectations around online learning are evolving. Institutions with strong student engagement in online courses are the ones finding ways to make online classes more attractive and engaging — and that means rethinking their use of technology, just like Pittsburg State University did.

“As an instructor, I wanted to shift away from the dreaded threaded online discussions. With Harmonize, we’ve engaged our students in more meaningful discussions and have seen students post well beyond the requirements. In fact, my class intro discussion had the most interaction and engagement I’ve seen in my 20 years of teaching online!,” commented Dr. Susan Dellasega Director, Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology.

Harmonize is a complete, one-stop-shop of interactive tools for online learning that integrate seamlessly with your LMS to facilitate a more engaging learning experience. With Harmonize, students gain a more cohesive, unified online course experience. Instructors spend less time training and more time teaching– all while institutions consolidate the high costs of using disparate tools.

Making your discussions modern and fresh, Harmonize is everything an instructor needs to increase student engagement in online discussions and promote inclusive learning, while saving time and eliminating manual tasks. So what are you waiting for? Let’s kickstart those online discussions today.