Options for Discussions

There are several options for initiating an online discussion.

A standard form of an online discussion is to raise an issue and request students to respond to the issue itself, and to each others responses. This is the type of discussion suggested in the activity. However there are other ways of initiating and structuring an online discussion.

Feenberg (1993) has found that the typical college seminar format has provided a useful model for an online discussion. Students in an online course will typically be asked to read an article or chapter of a book, and to be responsible for presenting an issue based on the reading to the class and guiding the discussion on that issue. Each student then becomes a "discussion moderator for a week". Students could be assigned issues or allowed to choose their own.

A variation on the model described above is to have a student post a short position paper to other students and then to defend the premises on which the paper is based. Again the student would be responsible for facilitating the discussion on that paper. For the next "seminar" another student would take the lead.