Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Angela Velez: Hi my name is Angela Velez and I am the Coordinator of Learning Technologies
at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and one of our strategies
for managing the online workload for teachers is to tailor your discussion board.
And to tailor the discussion board, you need to know in advance what you want
to do with your discussion board.
You need to know the purpose of how it's going to be used and that takes
into account what kind of class you have.
If you have a hybrid class you may not use your discussion board as often
as in an online only class which you'll use it all the time.
And one of the items is to organize it.
If you have units or you have weeks,
you organize your discussion board by weeks or by units.
Usually I wouldn't suggest doing any more than one week at a time
because it will get overwhelming.
The second thing is to figure the purpose of your discussion board;
what do you want your students to do?
Usually your purpose surrounds your weekly unit or what you want
to have the students bring away knowledge-wise at the end of the course.
Now if you have classes particularly large, you have a lot of students in this class,
you might want to consider grouping your students around a discussion question
so you have a group of 5 or 6 or 7 students and one forum and they are discussing a question
and then another group of 5 or 6 or 7 students discussing another question
because that makes it manageable for the students as well
as for you when it comes to grading.
If the class has a lot to learn, if you have a lot to cover,
you can create multiple discussion questions such as 3 or 4 discussion questions
and then have the students choose.
So they can choose 2 of those 4 and that also makes it more manageable for you
and it's also more interesting to the students and they're empowered
to choose what they want to answer.
The last thing is that if you have too many posts to read in your class,
you may want to have again choices, perhaps 1
to 3 discussion questions and make 1 of them required.
So in the required discussion question, you as an instructor will already know that every one
of your students if they're doing the right thing will answer that discussion question.
So you can participate in that one discussion question thread
and give your students individualized attention and they will be discussing
in other question threads that you could just monitor and not feel
like you have to respond to those.
Thank you.