Discourse

A lot of research shows that discourse and interaction in an online course correlate to the student enjoying the course. In this course I have experienced interaction but not as much as I thought. Maybe it is a time thing. Maybe I should be putting in more time. But some times when I do the work for the course interaction is a byproduct of getting my work done that will be graded. My ten discussion posts and my 4-6 blog posts.

I have only visited my classmates blogs a few times. Left mabye 5 comments on them. I have seen a few too many questions in the discussion forum, and attempted engagements go unanswered at worst and answered a week letter in other cases.

So how do you create lively discourse. Or is what I am experiencing a hundred times more lively than the norm? Can anything force more engagement? Force discussion posts every other day from students? Base the grade not only number of posts but requiring the students both start new discussion topics and respond to the classes posts.

The Angel LMS that I am familiar with even gives he teacher the option to shut off news posts in a discussion forum so the student has only one option and that is to reply to a previous post.

And what if our blog was graded similiar? While the rubric says we should read and comment on our class mates blog's it seems that is not figured in largely to the reflectivt blog grade. Instead a certain number of posts are required. Maybe the directions could be more forcefull, the student is required to blog on their own 4 times per module and is also required to reply 4 times to a classmates blog post.

I like the idea I talked about in my last discussion post, the idea of building rapport to start off the class. This can be done by having some fun. One idea I found was to go to this one website, answer 8 questions and find what kind of role you would play in midievel times. This idea reminded me of a website that I always found interesting, where you could plug in your birthday and your Mayan astrolgy peom would come out. It is a cool, ambiguous peom. Some students would have similiar poeteic lines based on similarities on birth charts.
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