Fostering e-learning discourse among professional networking groups

Abstract

Many instructors struggle to foster worthwhile discussions in on-line courses. We have refined a strategy that fosters extended discourse around the big ideas of a course while maintaining a reasonable workload for faculty and students. We refined this method in graduate-level courses on Learning Theory and on Educational Assessment with class sizes ranging from 15 to 40 students. The method does not use a discussion forum. Rather, the discussion takes place as comments placed directly on student-generated wikifolios. The method is structured to discourage initial discussion of concepts in the abstract. Instead, students discuss how course concepts take on different meaning in different contexts. This strategy should work in any e-learning setting where students are able to post wikis and make comments directly on those posts. This feature is available in the Sakai open-source course management system and in many commercial e-learning platforms.