Teaching with Quercus - Managing Online Discussions of Difficult Topics
By Priscilla - Discuss
About the Session Leaders
Justin Fletcher is a Faculty Liaison Coordinator, Center for Teaching, Support, and Innovation and Academic Collaborative Technologies at IT Services. If you've been to his other sessions, you'll notice that he wears his Quercus T-Shirt to all of them!
Cristina D'Amico is also a Faculty Liaison Coordinator at the University of Toronto. She loves to support students, faculty, and professionals with in-class and online instructional design.
Review the Session's Slidedeck
Plan and Organize
- Identify Your Topic. What is your discussion topic? What makes it controversial, difficult, sensitive, or challenging?
- Disucss for Learning. What is the purpose of this discussion? What do you want students to learn from the discussion?
- Complete Pre-Reflection. What values am I bringing to this discussion? Will these values be shared by my students?
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Set the Tone. Acknowledge you're conversing in a different space. Create ground rules in advance of the conversation
- See the participant generated rules from the session!
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Determine Discussion Questions and Outcomes
- Students may end up contributing information that steers the conversation away from the outcome
- Avoid yes/no questions
- Allow multiple perspectives to expressed
- Center around the learning outcomes
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Ensure Student Preparedness
- The discussion can go haywire if students rely only on personal anecdotes or do not have a sense of direction. Depending on the difficulty of the topic, you can choose to go with a rigid or more flexible structure. To do so, you can use a pre-discussion reading reflection or a pre-discussion reading quiz.
Select Your Approach
Remember, for a good discussion, it's important to allow everyone the opportunity to contribute!
- Establish protocol for asking questions or contributing
- Avoid singling out students
- Signpost discussion and reflection prompts
Synchronous Discussion
You can use platforms such as BB Collaborate, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom to host your discussion in real-time.
Roundtable
This strategy works very well in smaller sessions. You can go around in a circle, and every student have an opportunity to present. Remember, students can choose to pass any time!
Think-Pair and Group-Share
Students can reflect individually, then broken down into pairs or groups. Each group can choose a person to present their thoughts. This works well in larger classes.
Virtual Post-it Note
Students can collectively share their thoughts on a virtual platform such as Google Docs, BB Collaborate's Whiteboard, and more!
Asynchronous Discussion
You can use tools such as Quercus Discussions, PeppeR, and Ed Discussion.
- Model academic discussion etiquette for students through an example post
- Provide a rubric to clarify expectations
Collaborative Wiki
This project incoporates multiple forms of media and encourages students to gather information and reflect beforehand. You can host this on OneNote, a courses page wiki, or a simple shared document online.
Citational Practice
- Example: "Include 1-2 citations alongside your responses to your peers."
- The responses doesn't have to be strictly academic - it can also be personal thoughts and feelings! This practice encourages scholarly conversation, research, and promotes academic integrity.
Peer-to-Peer Learning
- Using threaded discussion boards, you can encourage peer-to-peer learning.
- For example: "Respond to two of your colleagues' posts before replying to the discussion thread."
- You can use the "must post first" feature in Quercus to set this up!
Things I've Learned
- It's okay to recieve responses like "I'm not sure, I don't know." This is all helpful information for you to have as the instructor!
- Never let your students feel pressured to respond. If they don't want to answer, move on without drawing more attention to them! We want this to be a safe place for discussions, not something they want to avoid.
- Think of scenarios beforehand. Conversations rarely go according to plan, so make sure you know how to steer the conversation in case students go off topic!
Have a Quercus (or EdTech) question? Please contact FASE's EdTech Office.
