Post 319: Add Context to your Forum posts

Post 319: Add Context To Your Forum Posts

Have you as faculty ever been in a hurry to finish up your forum discussion for the week? Have you felt the temptation to just rush through the process by making one sentence posts or one question posts to students as you would in a natural conversation?

Current teaching methodology states that our forums should be student centered and student led. However, many students complain to me that they miss having a teacher's presence in the student led classroom, or the student led forum.

As a matter of fact, students like to have teacher guidance in the discussion forums. Many older teachers were raised during the teacher centered classroom era. They sat as passive vessels for the teacher to fill with new information.When many older teachers started teaching a student centered classroom, they took that to mean hands-free and no teacher presence. Not true.

How do you know how much teacher presence to have in the forums without dominating the conversation? Just how much guidance do students in a student centered classroom need from a teacher? How exactly do you be a 'guide by the side' when the teacher was raised when the teacher was the 'sage on the stage?'  There is no easy answer. It takes experience. It is an art.  It is a curious balancing act.

In my discussion posts, I add context to my forum posts. If I am going to ask a student a question, I take some context from the reading, or I take context from an outside source, or I provide an outside source as the context, or I use a current event as context. 

The various context that you use in a DQ post takes the place of the class lecture if you are a face to face teacher suddenly forced to convert to online teaching due to the COVID19 crisis.  Instead of giving a one hour lecture, you give little bits of knowledge in the forum posts that serves as context for the questions you will ask students.

Example of context: Your reading mentions that once you create a research question and answer that research question, you have a thesis statement. What research question do you have for your paper? What thesis statement can you make by answering that research question for your paper?