Other ways to keep students engaged using asynchronous discussions

Here are a few more strategies that you can use to keep your students engaged in the discussion activities:

Use students to lead the discussion:

• Have students synthesize the weekly postings.
• Have students suggest a relevant topic discussion and let them moderate. Students may submit one question to you via e-mail for consideration. You select the question that is most relevant and have the student who submitted the question be the moderator for that discussion.
• Assign a group to be the experts on a topic or section. Have them post a question for discussion and lead the discussion. Toward the end of the class discussion, have the discussion leaders summarize and combine points for their classmates.

Promote interaction:

• Create debates by having students take sides on an issue and defend their positions. In blended environments you may poll students in class on a particular topic. Then you can have students support their positions in the online discussion area.
• Post a number of questions relating to a course topic. Assign students to work in small groups on these questions. Each group will then post their final results to the discussion.
• In blended environments, post a discussion question related to course readings prior to the in-class discussion. You can use comments from the online discussion to generate in-class discussion. This will help students prepare for the face-to-face discussion.

Regardless of how engaged students are, make sure that you always post a summary or conclusion to the discussion thread, and remember that this can take the form of homework for students.

(The above is adapted from Developing and Teaching Online Courses, Commonwealth of Learning 2014 and shared as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International)