This is the second part of the Rethinking Online Discussion Boards series, focusing on practical tweaks to Canvas’s existing structures.

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My TLi Faculty Innovation Fellowship has focused on challenges with online discussion boards. In part one, I explored the contradiction of using discussions as thinly veiled assessments rather than as tools for dialogue and exploration. In part two, I explore how we can change students’ expectations with shifts in language and logistics.

In wrestling with discussion boards, I sometimes feel like an airline whose passengers zone out during safety demonstrations: they know what to expect, so why pay attention? Airlines have tackled this challenge through  entertaining videos designed to bring “the briefing back into focus.”

Yet critics say a “new, no nonsense safety video” by Emirates may actually be more effective. By being transparent about the message, they set up buy-in rather than distraction. In online learning, transparency works, too. It humanizes assignments and invites students to think differently about talk. It can also develop trust and deepen a sense of belonging.

Recent scholarship has homed in on online belonging as interrelated with equity. Pacansky-Brock and colleagues discuss the challenges that occur when human beings, “social creatures who are wired for affinity and connection,” encounter the seclusion of an online learning environment.  They write, “we hypothesize that the isolation students experience at the start of an online class is another contextual factor that threatens belonging. For students who feel marginalized, that threat is exacerbated.”

These and other findings show the close relationship between belonging and college success and emphasize the importance of cultivating connections early. Accordingly, I began my first shift before the start of the semester.

Shift 1: Creating smaller spaces for community

It’s a human paradox that we often feel most isolated in large groups. An online discussion board of 50+ students isn’t (yet) a community. It’s a public space with a large, unknown audience—an ecosystem for growing anxiety. Thankfully, Canvas offers tools to make big spaces smaller. I decided to leverage existing relationships students may have in their face-to-face courses by creating stable pods to group those with similar majors and/or interests. The process was straightforward:

• I told students that I wanted to place them in shared interest groups and added questions to my pre-semester syllabus quiz, like what grade level they’d like to teach in the future.
• I matched students to groups based on their responses and then created a group set in Canvas with about eight stable learning pods.
• When creating discussions, I check the “group” discussion box and select the group set for students to communicate within their learning pod.

Shift 2: Make time for first impressions

With so much content to cover, I hadn’t set aside space in a module for student introductions until I read Martin and Bollinger’s study, “Engagement Matters.” Graduate students in their study ranked the lowly icebreaker as the most valuable tool for online learner-to-learner engagement, supporting prior research.

I tucked the icebreaker into our first learning log, along with some transparent language about the task:

Welcome to your learning log group! You will have this same group throughout the semester. It’s small(ish), 7-9 people, so you can get to know and trust each other’s perspectives. Be sure to follow our community guidelines [adapted from “What is Netiquette?”] for responding to discussion posts.

Each time, I will set an individual task and a group goal. The theme for this Log is Language (Dis)Connections.  

Your individual task: First, write a sentence to introduce yourself to your group. Tell them your preferred name and pronouns, and share something about you that they might not know. Then, [the first thinking task].

Your group’s task: Ensure that each of the group members receives at least one positive and authentic response…

I’m still analyzing responses to these first two shifts, but it’s already evident that setting up small, stable groups with time to get to know each other has paid off. Several students responded to every person in their learning pod.  During office hours or in emails, references to “my group” have cropped up organically, such as, “I’m learning a lot from my group” or “my group has been helping me out.”

Shift #3: Word counts are not organic

In part one, I suggested tilting the prompt toward desired thinking processes rather than content coverage.  For even more conversational language and even less evaluation, we have to rethink length requirements, too. Word counts may be a case of you get what you ask for. If I ask for 50 words, I usually get 50 words—but not a jot more. Fifty words of thinking that ended the moment of the fifty-first word. Fifty words of students “doing school” like passengers absentmindedly buckling seatbelts. 

In the interest of getting closer to genuine dialogue about topics that matter, I’ve dropped the length requirement for my discussion boards in favor of an individual goal (the thinking strategy or process they should use) and a group goal (the kind of peer responses they should give). Surprisingly, most students seem to be writing longer pieces than usual, some far longer. I wonder, is this elaboration a result of more freedom to explore ideas without a word count? Or having a prompt that pushes thinking instead of content? Or gaining a smaller audience that they’ve already “met”?

I can’t discount my own contributions to students’ posts, either. How much can my feedback encourage student writing and thinking? In part three, we’ll dive more deeply into  the instructor’s role in managing and grading online discussions.