Ways teachers (facilitators) can improve the productivity of online interaction.

1) Identify purpose - Participants must understand the intended purpose of online discussion.

The purpose of a discussion may be to:

• offer help to those experiencing difficulty.
• exchange information on a specific topic.
• persuade others of the value of a personal opinion.
• carefully and logically explore important ideas in order to achieve deeper understanding.
• evaluate knowledge or understanding to award a grade or alter the course of instruction.

These options are not completely independent, nor do they exhaust the possibilities. There is also no need to dedicate a discussion to only one narrow purpose.

Making the purpose or purposes of a discussion clear will help participants shape their comments and decrease the likelihood inexperienced participants misunderstand what is expected of them.

Consider how you might go about explaining the purpose of a discussion to learners of different ages. How would you explain the purposes listed here to 7th graders?

Explaining an information exchange seems easy enough.
We want to gather together what all of us have learned about what it was like to attend a one room school. If we think about several different stories, we should be able to create a list of the ways in which being a student has changed. Were you able to find a relative who attended a one room school? Who has a story to tell?

How would you attempt to explain the purpose of a discussion intended to generate personal understanding?
Let’s see if we can put together an explanation of the argument between the ranchers and the environmentalists over whether or not the ranchers should be able to graze cattle on land owned by the government. Why does each group feel it is right? What one disagreement do you feel will be most difficult to fix? Who wants to explain what the ranchers believe?

2. Define the roles you and the students will take.

Will you be an information provider, evaluator, or facilitator? Will students be primarily expected to concentrate their contributions on their opinions, factual knowledge, or reasoned comments?

The group should probably discuss roles. The instructor can explain that he/she will be responsible for presenting new information and leading the discussion or that he/she will offer a couple of leading questions and expects students to carry the conversation. If students are to discuss issues based on assigned reading or their understanding of other presentations, this would represent a different perspective than if they were to offer personal opinions. Students might be told, "Your comments should reflect what you have learned from readings or from class. Try to explain where your ideas are coming from."

3. Keep the discussion fresh by altering the techniques that are used.

• The format of a straight-forward can be modified to offer some variety.
• If it appears that students are taking sides on an issue, a simple poll would allow the group to see how mixed the opinions are on a specific topic.
• If the discussion has proceeded on an abstract level, present an example from personal experience and ask the group to determine if the principles in the preceding discussion apply.

4. Provide feedback

One of the fundamental and well-founded principles of behaviorism is that behavior is altered by its consequences. Those behaviors that generate what are regarded by the ?learner? as reinforcements are continued and those that generate either punishment or no consequence tend to decrease in frequency. Even when educators are concerned with the "internal or cognitive" behaviors of learners, it is relevant to recognize that there are consequences associated with the external behaviors (i.e., discussion behavior) intended to engage these internal behaviors.

The response of other discussion participants to "posts" would certainly represent one type of consequence.

The facilitator/instructor can respond in the conference or list or privately by e-mail to shape both positive and negative behaviors. Facilitator feedback can address several characteristics of discussion comments:

• social characteristics - e.g., acknowledging those who offer supportive comments ("Thanks for recognizing Paul’s contribution. He has good ideas, but tends not to say much. Your response may encourage him to participate more actively.") or criticizing those who are insensitive or insulting in the way they treat classmates ("Please avoid making negative personal comments about others in this class when expressing your disagreement with what they have to say.").
• pedagogical - e.g., acknowledge the type of comments that support the establish purpose for the discussion (e.g., "Thanks for providing that example. It is helpful to connect the general principles we discuss with specific classroom situations.") and discourage behaviors take the discussion in an undesirable direction.

The issue of grading could be considered as a special case of feedback. Grading any activity (paper, test, discussion) is a way of establishing a consequence and it is assumed that the student will respond to higher grades as reinforcement and lower grades as punishment. For on-line courses, there might be an expectation that participants post at least one message each week and this level of activity might guarantee a certain number of points toward the final grade. More sophisticated and clearly more labor intensive evaluation systems might involve the instructor in evaluating prescribed characteristics of the learner’s comments. MacKinnon (2000) provides a good example of how a more detailed evaluation system can help learners adjust their discussion behavior. MacKinnon created a categorization system and allocated different point values to different types of statements. Irrelevant comments were awarded no points. Simple statements of information taken from course material were awarded 1 point and statements involving application, linking examples with principles, linking principles with examples, and cause and effect comments reflecting deeper thinking were awarded 2 points. Students could accumulate up to ten point per discussion session toward the course grade and this could be accomplished by accumulating points from any statement category. MacKinnon tracked the type of statements across three discussion sessions. The first session was dominated by information statements. Following this session, MacKinnon marked the presence of each category of information in the comments made by each student and returned this summary of their participation to the students. Statements worth more points were proportionally more common in the following discussion sessions. Would students have responded in the same fashion if their attempts to move beyond factual statements had generated praise or encouragement rather than points toward their grades? There is no way to tell from the MacKinnon study.

5. Support the discussion by weaving and summarizing.

Sometimes, it is useful to think of the purpose of a discussion as building personal and collective understanding. "Weaving" describes the instructional activity of bringing together ideas raised during a discussion. It demonstrations the "connections" the facilitator has observed as the discussion proceeds.

• Sam, your comments seem similar to Sally’s comments. You both have provided examples of teachers whose behavior in using images taken from the Internet provided poor examples for their students.
• Let’s see - our examples of copyright issues now include the use of videotaped television programs, distributing copies of sheet music, and using images taken from the Internet.

"Summarization" describes the broader integration of ideas that might occur at the end of a discussion session. A summarization provides a broad integration of

Weaving and summarizing as opportunities for cognitive apprenticeship.

In chapter 2, we describe cognitive apprenticeship as a situation in which the learner functions in the role of apprentice to a more expert practitioner - typically the teacher. In this approach, the teacher takes the most active role and models important cognitive behaviors. Because cognitive behaviors (mental processes) cannot be directly observed, important behaviors are defined in terms of behaviors that can be demonstrated.
The pedagogical goals of discussion often would include having the learner build a personal understanding of the topic by actively integrating the ideas raised in the discussion with existing knowledge. The teacher as "expert practitioner" can model such behaviors through weaving and summarizing. Weaving and summarizing can be demonstrated and would seem one way to "external" key components of the personal construction process involved in building personal understanding. As in other examples of cognitive apprenticeship (e.g., reciprocal teaching), the external behaviors can first be modeled by the expert and then required of the apprentices under supervision. Sources offering suggestions for discussion include a similar suggestion - e.g., make a student participant responsible for summarizing the key points of a discussion session.

6. Be aware of who participates and who does not

What is the discussion policy on "lurkers"? If contributions are not required, how will you know if all students assigned to a discussion activity are reading the comments being posted? Some sophisticated systems allow the facilitator to access information providing data on who has read which messages. It is sometimes useful to contact individuals privately and ask about their participation. Perhaps reluctant students simply need a little encouragement.

Kimball, L. (1995). Ten ways to make online learning groups work. Educational Leadership, 53(2), 54-56.

MacKinnon, G. (2000). The dilemma of evaluating electronic discussion groups. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 33, 125-131.

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