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How to Develop Effective Discussion Questions - Part III: Administrating Conferences/Discussion Questions

Ron Benson

Adjunct Faculty

Graduate School of Management and Technology

Published: January-February 2008

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Classroom-communication

Crafting  discussion questions, as discussed in Parts I and II in previous issues, is only part of effective discussions. This last segment, Part III, Administrating Conferences / Discussion Questions, addresses conference administrative issues.

Offer a Variety of Questions

An effective strategy for offering alternative discussion questions is let students choose questions that match either their work experiences (or lack thereof), learning styles, or other characteristics pertinent to them. For instance, students with minimal work experience might do better focusing on questions that involve literature and internet searches. Students with years of experience and achievements thrive on interpreting their experience in terms of the course content in conjunction with searches. A discussion requirement that works well is to require students to directly answer two of five questions and respond to three separate postings of others.  This obviously would be adjusted based on the size of the class. A goal is to provide a variety of discussion questions that are stimulating enough to intrinsically motivate all students to participate.

Previous parts of this series discussed the role of Bloom's Taxonomy in crafting discussion questions. Table 2 below offers another consideration in developing questions. It contains four different learning styles and illustrates how students respond differently in discussions (Muir, 2001). Table 2 can serve as a checklist to see if questions are sufficiently varied.

Table 2: Learning styles and student response characteristics.

Constructed from information in Muir, D.J. "Adapting Online Education to Different Learning Styles", In Building on the Future. NECC 2001: National Educational Computing Conference proceedings (22^nd, Chicago, IL, 2001)

Knowledge Application from Personal Experiences

"War stories" concerning personal life experiences provide a medium for thinking about course content and crafting good discussion questions. Stating an example and asking students to apply the course content ("what why' when, where and how") often works well. From the student's side, offering life experiences to illustrate and discuss concepts contributes greatly to understanding and internalizing knowledge. Relating personal experience to the content helps to bridge the gap from memorized facts to usable knowledge (higher Bloom competencies). 

Faculty experiences also make good responses to student postings to better illustrate a point or note alternative circumstances. These can be fictional if they assist in conveying the needed information. 

Of course, some face-to-face faculty have been accused of doing nothing but relating "war stories" and some with no particular relevance. With online teaching, the effort required to compose and enter life experience type stories can act like a governor to control the length and relevancy of these.

Instructor Participation in Conferences

A pertinent issue related to effective discussion questions is the type and frequency of responses by the course instructor. A large study covering three semesters and 20 sections found an interesting correlation that the more an instructor participates, the less students participate. (Mazzolini, 2003)

the percentage of instructor postings within a forum showed a significant negative correlation with the length of discussion threads (N = 29, R = −0.67, p < 0.01).

Students appeared to consider instructor postings as "the last word' on discussion threads thereby ending the thread. Interestingly and almost contradictory, the authors also found that student satisfaction and views of instructor enthusiasm were positively correlated with the number of instructor postings. Students' comments indicated that they favored instructor involvement that consisted of questions, as opposed to answers. A variable not considered in the research was the level of critical thinking in the original questions and whether the questions had a single correct answer. But the research did infer that there was an optimal amount of interaction, rather than merely more is better.

Like any conversation, sometimes it is best to just pull back and listen. But when asked for information or an opinion, responses within a day are highly valued by students. Checking conferences daily and making at least one posting per day, to show interest and involvement, is highly recommended and it spreads the work a little.

Student Problems

Online education is a new paradigm for some students and problems do arise. Open ended and complex questions require extra effort and time for students for which they often are not prepared. Late responders require students to backtrack to previous units which can be distracting and time consuming, so rules to discourage lateness are required. Students who have done well in their undergraduate career via an approach of memorize and recite (Bloom's knowledge competency level) can get highly frustrated. On the other hand, some students will write voluminous answers that frustrate other students, and are probably ignored. In this latter case, it is usually effective to post Pascal's (1657) quote on short/long letters: "I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."  

It was noted above how some students are late responders. Some will jump right in at the beginning of the week, and others prefer the end of the week, or later. It is not hard to determine which approach is normal for a student. As an aside, this author has experimented with various ways of forming teams for group exercises and found that forming groups according to when they respond has made for much improved group experiences and results. This does raise the question of what group experience are intended to teach.

Grading Conferences

Creating, participating and revising discussion questions require substantial effort and time. Faculty time is not unlimited nor is extra time compensated. Consequently, frequency of grading and posting comments concerning discussion grades is a difficult issue.

Fifteen weeks of five questions per week and 25-50 postings per question (about 3500 postings total) requires a conscious allocation of time. Posting grading comments for each week's participation normally is not possible and may not be needed.  Comments are most effective within the discussion threads. Student reactions to their peer's postings also provide a substantial feedback. Some students are quite sensitive to not being involved and faculty should look for students who are being left out. It appears that students often do this as well. Individual comments are needed for inappropriate behavior/topics and students who obviously "do not get it."

Student conference participation involves a substantial amount of time and effort, therefore sufficient weight in the grading system must be allocated to it. In this author's experience, approximately 30% of the total course grade seems to work well. Some faculty members assign conference grades for each week, and others for every three or four weeks. Grading on quantity of postings or words, or time online will usually lead to games by the students. Grades need to be based on contributions to the discussions; admittedly a time-consuming value judgment.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is critical to the educational process including revisions to content, projects, exams, and especially discussion questions. The discussion question capability in an online environment provides hard data that particularly lends itself to continuous improvement for revising discussion questions. For instance, the instructor should review postings to determine if answers revealed that students had inadequate backgrounds to address the posted questions. Other considerations might be: Were there misconceptions in knowledge? Do new topic areas need to be explored? Were the questions poorly worded? Regarding the latter, it takes discipline to not blame the student when one sees several responses that missed the point that the instructor intended. Simple clarifications quickly solve problems.

Quantity and quality of responses provide valuable information and should be considered together. Questions that only prompt a few good responses are not necessarily bad if the other students learn from them or are motivated by them to do additional research, etc. However, some questions can lead to voluminous postings with no meaningful results. Assessing student responses each semester will provide critical information for revising questions and provide a continual improvement process for administering effective online conferences. Keeping two sets of questions, before and after discussions, is critical.

Conclusion

Teaching online versus face-to-face is viewed by some instructors as a definite positive in that reading student discussion responses offers valuable personal insights. Stereotypical assumptions made from gender, nationality, employment position, stature etc. simply do not exist. Conceicao's (2006) notes that an online instructor "learned a lot more from his online learners than face-to-face learners because the profile of the online learners had a tremendous influence on how the experience evolved." Another instructor, impressed with the diversity of his online student population, notes "I have learned … from my online [learners] a lot more than I have learned the previous 15 years from my on-campus [learners]."

Discussion questions are a critical aspect of online education and can often determine the difference between a positive student learning experience verses courses being a chore at best. Discussions and discussion questions are most likely a large factor in student evaluations. While discussion questions are often the last task addressed in designing and teaching a course, they may be the first in importance. Probably the best learning occurs when good discussion questions enable students to simultaneously function as both teacher and student. This applies to faculty members as well.