Designing Active, Collaborative, and Engaging Online Discussions: Prompts, Responses and Reflections

Online discussions as learning spaces: Active learning, community-building, and engagement. They provide new spaces to engage students, share information, acquire content knowledge, and develop valuable skills. This innovation presents challenges for faculty in designing, using, and managing relevant and meaningful educational experiences appropriate for students. This session will describe and discuss how to design better online discussions to support learning of new knowledge and skills for specific content areas, specifically in graduate education. It will discuss how the use of these communication technologies can empower students to achieve their academic goals. The presentation will appeal to individuals with professional interest in using specific online communication and collaboration tools, and faculty members who are thinking of using communication technologies as primary or complementary tools in their teaching. Anyone working with graduate students or anyone engaged in distance learning and teaching will also find the ideas presented in this session useful.