My colleagues at FITS have already provided many helpful tips for developing and facilitating effective discussions in online courses. Josh cautions against teaching a correspondence course and explains, “the best discussion questions don’t have a clear answer, and sometimes they aren’t even clear questions.” He also encourages instructors to provoke debate and ask those pointed and room-dividing questions. And Ashanti provides strategies for generating discussions that matter, such as providing opportunities for student-led discussions and pushing students to draw real-world connections.

Still, even with these strategies and course design principles in mind, it can be hard to get every student involved and engaged. Julie Stella and Michael Corry recognize this, and engagement is a focus in “Intervention in Online Writing Instruction.” Stella and Corry argue for “an interwoven perspective of motivation, engagement, agency, and action in Online Writing Instruction,” and in the process provide some helpful tips for all online educators.

Stella and Corry begin with an overview of the current literature centered on engagement and agency, and specifically the ways these concepts are treated in Self-Determination Theory (SDT). As they explain, SDT is “a framework through which educators may be able to reliably predict the motivation a student feels toward academic tasks.” In other words, the good stuff instructors are always trying to tap into. In SDT, all students – and humans – are thought to be working towards satisfying three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Engagement is optimized if these three needs are met, and they are met through human action. Corry and Stella understand human action to be more complex than the label implies, and explain that human actions are a part of a “larger motivational system” and include physical gestures plus the emotions, intentions, and goals associated with them.

In online education, human actions are harder to observe. We can see when a student posts to a discussion board, or misses an assignment due date, but we can’t always get at the other stuff: how they felt, why they posted, what influenced their late submission, etc. We miss out on some of the information that can be derived from observing a student’s body language, for example. So, it’s harder for us as instructors to know when and how to intervene.

As Corry and Stella persist, there are many reasons that students may struggle in an online classroom, but not all of them are factors we can control. For that reason, they suggest alterable variables as focus for online educators when seeking to optimize student engagement and agency in their classrooms. We can foster student agency in classrooms by helping students to personalize their learning experience. This is understood as agentic engagement, and “agentic engagement measures the extent to which the receiver of an action modifies their response, and the communication continues in a circular way.”

So, agency isn’t just in the hands of students; instructors must also be prepared to modify their responses to students’ attempts to personalize their learning experiences.

By focusing on alterable variables, instructors can intervene earlier and more effectively to engage (or re-engage) students. And Corry and Stella identify discussion boards as a good place to intervene and promote agentic engagement. The following list is drawn from Cory and Stella, and provides strategies for promoting student agency and engagement on discussion boards:

• Point students to each other by name when they discuss similar things on different discussion posts or boards.
• Model responses. Students will likely note the structure, tone, and content of instructor posts and use that as a way to begin and develop their own responses.
• Enlarge questions to include all students. For example, if you ask a question to one student, you can open the discussion up with questions like: “What do you all think of that?” “If anyone else has used this, post your experience, so we can all learn from it.” Doing this can help to mitigate student concerns that there is only one correct response.
• Clarify points and present opposing viewpoints; students might be need a push to begin debate.
• Keep an combined list of ideas, examples, and solutions students have presented in a discussion and post this somewhere it will be easy to reference, like a summative discussion post or a news item. Use the students’ names when compiling responses to acknowledge their contribution.
• Change the subject or title of the post when replying to students. This makes it easier for students to scan the board and see where their ideas might fit – and also helps to add variety.

What other tips and tricks do you have for facilitating discussions in online and hybrid courses? When do you intervene?