Module 5

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Module 5: Foster Student-to-Student Interaction

Many instructors aim to create a sense of community in the classroom with intentional assignments, discussions, and activities aimed at creating a connection and a shared intellectual community among students. It's possible to extend that same approach outside of the classroom by using the tools available via bCourses to provide opportunities for student-to-student interaction. Additionally, you will want to ensure students who have to miss several classes can still be part of the class community by incorporating asynchronous opportunities for interaction.

You will find there are times when you will want to create a discussion assignment where students will receive a grade for their participation, and other times you'll create a discussion that is not graded but available as a forum solely in which students can interact with one another. 

There are many tools available in bCourses that can provide different types of interaction among students including Discussions, Collaborations (bCourses integration with Google Docs), and Suite C, a tool developed at UC Berkeley to allow for easier sharing of visual materials and group work collaboration. Additionally, the Ed Discussion platform, which is integrated with bCourses, can be used as an alternative to Discussions in bCourses.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you'll be able to:

All of these learning objectives will help you to achieve the overall course objective: Provide opportunities for active student-to-student interaction.

How To Do It

Use tools in bCourses to create opportunities for student-to-student discussion, collaboration, and Q&A

There are four main tools built into bCourses that you can use for student-to-student interaction: Discussions, Ed Discussion, Collaborations, and Suite C. 

Discussions: bCourses' main tool for supporting interaction between students. You can use Discussions to create a space for students to respond to guided prompts and each other asynchronously that can be graded or create a discussion for ungraded interaction such as a Q&A forum. In many cases, you can take questions you would've asked students during class meeting time and easily transition those to a discussion. 

Since Discussions is such a heavily used tool, you will find more detailed information about how to use Discussions further down in this module.

Ed Discussion: An alternative discussion platform, integrated with bCourses. Ed Discussion provides an array of features—including categorization, filtering, and searching of posts, commenting, @mentions, thread templates, runnable code snippets, Markdown and LaTeX formatting—that create a flexible and dynamic multi-threaded discussion and Q&A space. Ed Discussion is particularly effective if you are not using guided prompts to create graded discussion "assignments," but instead want to build a fluid and interactive class community space for Q&A and multi-threaded discussions. With Ed Discussion, you can still assign an overall grade in bCourses for student participation.

Review RTL's Online Discussions page for more information on how to use Ed Discussion.

Collaborations: Google docs integration with bCourses. You can use it to create editable Google Docs where students can generate new work together, share resources, or actively respond to instructor-provided content.

Below are some examples of ways instructors use Collaborations.

  • Provide text in a Google Doc prompting students to comment on specific sections and respond to each other’s comments.
  • Assign students a shared essay that is completed in a Google Doc.
  • Review how much each student contributed to the shared essay by clicking on “Last edit” in the Google Doc.

Review the Collaborations section of the Canvas Guides Links to an external site. for more information on how to use this tool.

SuiteC: UC Berkeley-created tool that integrates with bCourses and includes two components that can be used separately or together: the Asset Library and Engagement Index. It allows students to share, edit, and comment on media and documents while tracking and highlighting active engagement. Below are some examples of how instructors use SuiteC.

  • Set up your Engagement Index Points Configuration before the course starts to encourage the types of interaction you’d like students to engage in.
  • Use the Asset Library as a shared resource where students can use assets that others have added in their own assignments throughout the course.

Review the SuiteC service page for more information on how to use this tool.

Add a new discussion in bCourses

As discussed above, Discussions in bCourses is a great tool to use for creating graded and ungraded student-to-student interaction in your remote instruction course. The following resources from the Canvas Guides explain how to create, assign, and edit a discussion.

After you've created a discussion, you may want to update specific settings or allow students to use different features. Below is a list of specific articles from the Canvas Guides highlighting the most common features instructors use to manage a discussion.

Respond to students publicly in a bCourses discussion

Separate from grading students’ participation in discussions, you will also want to respond to student posts, within the threads, to show that you are also actively engaged in the discussion. You can also highlight productive threads or redirect threads that slide off-topic or veer down unproductive paths. The following articles from the Canvas Guides explain how to participate in a discussion. 

View and grade student contributions to a bCourses discussion in SpeedGrader

Discussions are graded just like any other assignment via SpeedGrader. When you go to the Gradebook and use the SpeedGrader for the specific discussion assignment, you will see all of the responses the student posted in the discussion and can leave a private comment on their work. You can review the information about SpeedGrader in Module 4: Add, Edit, and Grade Assignments.

Use bCourses groups to create opportunities for small group interactions and assignments

Many instructors opt to have students organize into smaller discussion groups in bCourses to complete the discussion assignments. This is one way to allow for small group interaction while assisting GSIs in managing activity. If you use groups for a discussion, when a student clicks on the discussion assignment, they will be taken directly to the group's discussion space and can add their comments. You can also use groups to facilitate group projects to provide specific space in which students can interact with each other. The resources from the Canvas Guides below explain how to create, use, and manage groups. 

Students may have questions about how to access their group space in bCourses. The following article from the Canvas Guides explains how students can view their groups.

Best Practices

Now that you know how to complete the activities covered in this module, read more about how best to use them in your course.