Best Practices: Foster Student-to-Student Interaction

Below are some best practices that you can follow to foster student-to-student interaction for your students outside of the classroom setting.

Include an introduction discussion at the beginning of the course
Provide guidelines for productive, meaningful, and respectful interaction between students
Encourage productive discussion threads and redirect unproductive threads
Create a regular pattern for responding to discussion prompts and other students
Share interesting and relevant interactions from group discussions with the rest of the course

Include an introduction discussion at the beginning of the course

An introductory discussion or activity in bCourses will immediately build a sense of community among your class. It doesn’t have to be much. For instance, start a bCourses discussion with a simple prompt (such as in the example below), then ask students to respond to at least two other students. To encourage full participation, consider offering a small amount of the course grade for completion.

Below is an example introduction discussion prompt (customize as needed):

Please introduce yourself to the class. You may choose to address some of the following questions:

Where you are from?

What is your current major and/or occupation?

Why are you interested in taking this course and what do you hope to learn from it?

In reviewing the course syllabus, what topics are you most excited about studying—and why?

Post your response as a reply to this topic. Then reply to the postings of at least two other students.

Provide guidelines for productive, meaningful, and respectful interaction between students

Provide guidelines and expectations for discussion assignments just as you would were you providing directions for any other type of assignment. Specify the length of what students should write in response to your prompt, if they should include references to course or outside materials, and how they will be graded. You should also provide guidelines for how you'd like them to respond to each other. You have an opportunity to cultivate the type of discussion you'd like students to engage in with these guidelines. For example, you may ask students to respond to one student they agree with and one they disagree with; push the conversation past simple agreement and disagreement by providing additional cited references to support why they agree or disagree with a classmate; or pose a question as their response and require students to respond to all questions they receive. The guidelines themselves will vary by course, but if you don't provide those guidelines, students are likely to default to posting "great point" and consider that a response.

It's also important to state at the beginning of the course the types of behavior expected in a discussion. This may include instructing students to maintain a respectful tone, specifying that racist and sexist language will not be tolerated, or reminding students to focus on critiquing arguments and not peers. Though it may seem obvious, it's important to state these expectations clearly so everyone in the class understands how to engage in a discussion and you can refer back to them if issues arise during the semester.

Encourage productive discussion threads and redirect unproductive threads

Though the main use of Discussions is to provide a venue for student-to-student interaction, it's important that the instructor and GSIs also participate by replying to student posts. This helps to create a sense of community in the course and ensure that students stay on track. However, it's not necessary to comment publicly on every student post. A great way for instructors and GSIs to participate is by responding to productive discussion threads and letting the rest of the class know what is useful about them. This will cause more students to read and join in with that discussion. It is also useful to find threads that have become unproductive and respond to those by correcting any misinformation, encouraging the students to move away from it, or framing the conversation differently so that it can become productive. In this way, students will have some guidance on how to interact and feel that you are engaging with them.

Create a regular pattern for responding to discussion prompts and other students

A common format for a discussion assignment is to have students respond to a provided prompt and then respond to what other students have written. Since students will need to make that initial post in a timely manner in order to allow time for responses, it's recommended to create a regular pattern for students to write and post their initial response and then complete the assignment by posting a response to other students. In many online courses, you'll see the guidance to make the initial post by Wednesday and then post responses to other students by Saturday, for example.

Share interesting and relevant interactions from group discussions with the rest of the course

In many courses, students will be engaging in a discussion within smaller groups. It may happen that you'll see some interesting interchanges happening in one group, but the rest of the students in the course will not see the discussion. This is a great opportunity to share the main points of the discussion via an announcement. It can motivate students to hear what is happening in other groups and provide an opportunity for them to engage with the same concepts in their own discussion forums.