 Hello and welcome to the Western Washington University pro-users group. Today we're going to talk about why you might want to use online discussions. This is your support team for our interim move to online instruction. I'm Lauren Nicandre. I'm the educational technologist for outreach and continuing education. Feel free to reach out to any of us with questions that you might have in our series of videos. So let's talk about why you might want to use online discussions in your courses. First of all, one of the main benefits is that they can take place asynchronously, which is basically students are able to access these on their own time when they're able to get to them after they may have had time to do your course readings. And if they have work, for instance, and they need to do childcare, things like that. The discussion forums are a great way to allow them to engage with their fellow classmates and talk about the course content. And it really offers an opportunity for you to ask some questions that give them the ability to do some higher order thinking skills, because they have time to formulate their responses and really think about those and maybe even reference things, site sources and whatnot. So that's a really great way to continue this online learning in a meaningful way that that gives students an opportunity to still actually interact with one another. The next piece is it's kind of an introductory opportunity to start some of that community building and that can be done with forums where they might introduce themselves to an icebreaker. For instance, they might provide some responses to questions like who are you, where are you learning from? What are your hobbies? What are you excited to learn about in this course? Various things like that that sort of introduce everyone to one another and provide that human element, because they may be doing group work later on where you'll want them to sort of have a sense of one another. So discussion forums can provide a nice place for that. The next piece is teacher presence and teacher presence is critical for the students to see you as sort of a guide in the class as well as a person who is available for them. What I would say about discussion forums is it's not necessary for you to respond to every single post that students will make in response to the forum questions, but it's a good place for you to redirect if you're facilitating, for instance, redirect some things that may be incorrect in a nice way, but also provide additional resources, ask follow-up questions, but also support those students when you identify areas that you might want to contribute additional thoughts and things like that. So again, don't feel like you have to chime into every single response, but your presence in those forums is important to them to see you as an expert as well as someone who's helping to facilitate their learning. So thanks so much for watching this video. And again, if you have any questions, please follow up with us.