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online discussions

Jump-Start Online Discussion with Unconventional Prompts

Discussion forums are ubiquitous in online education despite getting mixed reviews from students and teachers. Faculty complain of students giving only perfunctory responses, while students lament discussion questions that allow only cursory answers.

The problem is the prompt is often written in language requesting a

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Modeling Discussion Board Posts with Discussion Labs

Discussion is one of the biggest challenges for online students, and poor discussion is one of the biggest complaints among online faculty. Student responses are often perfunctory, lacking the depth the instructor desires. But rather than laziness, poor discussion often results from students not knowing

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Small-Block Online Course Design: What We Can Learn from MOOCs

The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and

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Rethinking the Rules of Online Discussion

One of the hallmarks of online learning is that students can engage in deeper discussion than they can in most face-to-face courses due to the additional think-time for crafting posts and responding to others. But many online instructors report disappointment in class discussions because students

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