 Hello and welcome to our Western Washington University pro-users group for designing Canvas discussions. Today, we're going to talk about student involvement in the moderating and the facilitating of discussion forums. Again, this is your support team. I'm Lauren Nicandre. I'm an educational technologist for outreach and continuing education. Feel free to reach out to any of us with questions on our videos that we've provided for you during this time where we are moving to online instruction in the interim. So as far as delegating and moderating discussions go, there's several options for you when you are looking to leverage your students to sort of help with that, but also increase their engagement as well as higher order thinking and wanting to create opportunities for them to really sort of be more involved in their own learning. So in order to do this, you have some options so you can actually assign your students as discussion facilitators. Again, this will depend on your class size. Sometimes you might choose two or three students. If you have a very, very large class, you might decide to separate some sections out so that you have smaller groups in discussions and then you can sort of gauge how many facilitators you might need for that. But you can also create multiple discussion questions each week that are related to the content you're covering. Oftentimes it's helpful to have your facilitators come up with these questions in advance so they have some ownership over that. And you could have them submit them to you the week before that they're supposed to facilitate, for instance, and you can sort of go over those and vet them or give any feedback you might have or suggestions prior to the actual week that they'll be facilitating. Again, this is really great because they're sort of working together, building some communication strategies and working to divide up the workload amongst themselves as well so they can decide who's going to do what as far as the moderating goes. Are they going to each facilitate a separate discussion question, for instance? Or are they going to sort of tag back and forth on different days to respond to other students? They can kind of work that out amongst themselves in those facilitation groups. And then another option since your facilitators will be doing a lot of work, kind of keeping that discussion flowing, monitoring for appropriate etiquette, and really just kind of being in the forum and being very, very present. So they may not actually be answering the discussion questions that week. So what you can have them do is sort of evaluate their own experience and assess that and give feedback and reflection on what it was like to be a facilitator and what they've learned from that process and from their peers. So that's a great way to assess the folks who are facilitating discussions because they may not have that more traditional response that the rest of your students will have to the discussion questions.