What Is It?
Hoping to grade fewer discussions while offering students more flexibility? Transitioning to Harmonize from a tool that offers a single, semester-long, auto-graded discussion area?
For a variety of reasons, faculty may want to think outside the box of the traditional discussion board (where a single prompt guides the discussion for a short period of time) and try to offer a more flexible, organic experience to students (where they drive the discussion, introducing new topics and choosing when and how to participate over a longer time interval).
Why Use Multi-Week, Student-Driven Discussions
- Student agency. Instead of narrowly defining a topic of conversation, multi-week discussions make space for students to introduce their own discussion topics, allowing their needs and interests to drive the conversation.
- Flexibility. Letting a discussion run for a few weeks allows students to participate when they are able. Some students may finish early, and others may do all their work at the end. Student needs, rather than a strict deadline schedule, can drive when participation occurs.
- Less grading. When you use longer time intervals for your discussions, you will have fewer discussions to grade. Coupled with Auto-grading, you can save time on tedious tasks and instead spend it where you want: engaging your students in lively discussions.
How to Set up Multi-Week Discussion Boards
- Choose time intervals for your discussions that correspond to the rhythms of your course. For example, you might have students do a three-week discussion board before having a quiz/paper week.
- Create your discussion boards by following the instructions for Creating Graded Discussions in Harmonize.
- Set a single milestone at the end of each discussion board when all posts and comments are due. This offers maximum flexibility to students for when they participate (you can later re-evaluate and space out the milestones if you choose). See Milestones.
- Turn on auto-grading and choose whether or not to allow late participation to earn points. See Auto-grading.
General Tips and Strategies
Show students how to sort.
By default, oldest posts appear first in Harmonize. Students will need to sort by “newest” or “new/unread” to view the newest posts at the top. They will only need to do this once for each discussion board. See Sorting Posts.
Give explicit instructions.
Your students may not be used to participating organically rather than following a prompt. Explicitly tell them what kinds of content they can post and explain what makes for a good post or reply.
Model and reward strong participation.
Post your own models and be sure to comment on (and react [LINK] to) student posts that are relevant conversation starters.
Reevaluate at the end of the first discussion interval.
See how things go during your first discussion interval and then make changes as appropriate in subsequent intervals. For example:
- Did everyone wait until the last minute to post? For the next interval, consider spacing out the milestones in the next interval.
- Did everyone post right away and get done too early? For the next interval, consider having a discussion board for each week to space out the participation.
- Did everyone post on a single topic or post the same kind of material? For the next interval, consider making starter posts for the different topics (or types of content) students can post.
Options and Ideas
| Idea | Description |
|---|---|
| Overlapping Boards | Consider making intervals overlap so conversations can extend naturally. For example, you could have a board run from weeks 1-3, with a second board running from weeks 3-5. |
| Starter Topics | Optionally, you can create starter posts to represent the different topics that students could discuss in each period. Give each starter post a fun image and descriptive post title. Set all milestones to be for comments rather than posts (since students will reply to your posts instead of making new posts). |
| Single Module |
Miss having everything in one place? In addition to putting discussions boards in individual, weekly modules, consider also putting them in a single module all together. This helps create the feeling that everything is in one place. Note: Check how this would work in your particular LMS. In Canvas, the same activity can appear in multiple modules. |
| Single Board |
If you really love having a single discussion board, you can create a Harmonize discussion board that runs all semester. In this case, you can use milestones to create the time intervals. Note: If you choose this option, students could complete all the posts and comments very early in the semester and receive full credit. Grades will not pass back until the end of the semester. |