Many online instructors struggle to engage students in online discussions. Despite their best intentions, professors often have discussion boards that languish as the semester proceeds, and students often engage just as much as they need to in order to get a grade. Visions of creating vibrant online communities where ideas are traded and understanding is deepened often don't play out how instructors hope, and the day-to-day maintenance of discussion boards (reading, grading, responding to students) can overwhelm even the most dedicated professors.
This session will demonstrate how to re-think online discussion boards and redesign them from the ground up to be much more effective through the use of video. However, it's not just about requiring students to post a video response like what you might see in FlipGrid or other platforms. Rather, this session will show how reconceptualizing discussion boards as fertile ground for student-to-content interaction, rather than the traditional student-to-student interaction in most discussion boards, yields excellent results for both students and faculty.
Simon Ringsmuth