Cultivating an engaging, interactive learning environment is key to promoting critical thinking and self-regulatory skills. And peer discussion is among effective ways to stimulate a space that encourages meaningful interactions, and reflections. However, the absence of physical contacts in online learning makes it challenging to facilitate student-student interactions.
How can instructors organize effective peer discussions that stimulate collaborative learning, deeper understanding and learning?
Select your LMS:
CREATE DISCUSSION ASSIGNMENT
Instructors create discussion assignments, specify the instructions, discussion topics, deadlines, collaboration options, and other requirements
facilitate the discussion process
Students engage in the discussion, following the set deadlines and teacher guidelines on giving comments
reflect on performance and grading
Students can write a reflection on their performance throughout the assignment, which can be counted as part of the final grade.
Provide detailed analytics on student participation and progress in the assignments, from which teachers can identify who has completed the required steps and which student might need help.
Allow teachers and students to identify which comments or points to focus on with multiple ways of filtering and sorting the discussion input: the most/least comments, the most upvotes, and more.
Set up discussion guidelines for students to have meaningful and effective dialogues.
Set up a reflection step at the end of the activity, in which students write a reflection on what they learned from the discussion assignment.
Students can discuss the topic individually or within groups. When the groups are activated, students can respond to the discussion prompt in the same assignment, while only seeing the contributions made by peers within their group.
Provide detailed analytics on student participation and progress in the assignments, from which teachers can identify who has completed the required steps and which student might need help.
Allow teachers and students to identify which comments or points to focus on with multiple ways of filtering and sorting the discussion input: the most/least comments, the most upvotes, and more.
Make submitters of discussion posts and repliers to those posts anonymous if desired.
Set up a reflection step at the end of the activity, in which students write a reflection on what they learned from the discussion assignment.
Discussion on Work
Stimulate meaningful student-student interaction in the submissions with Discussion on Work
Interactive Video
Interactive Video allows you to enhance student engagement with videos
Streamlined learning activity setup
All you need to do is to describe the assignment, choose the right settings and enjoy.
Easy-to-use, uniform design
All tools have a similar look and feel – which flattens the learning curve for both teachers and students.
Co-created with educators
Tools are co-created with educators from partner universities, thus support even the most advanced use cases.