 In both of the courses that I've designed online, one of the things that I wanted to really ensure happened was modeling or at least stimulating to some extent the experience the students have in my face-to-face courses that are the same. And in my face-to-face courses what I do is I always have students tend to be large classes divided into small groups that they work with throughout the term and they have a lot of opportunity to collaborate with one other, discuss the course content with each other, develop relationships, you know, work together, so they're learning a whole set of skills. And that setting feels really nice in a face-to-face classroom because students, you know, feel like they really are getting to know their classmates, they have lots of opportunities to share their ideas, I get to know them because they're working in those small groups and so it makes a large class feel like a small class. So I wanted to translate that into the online setting but of course it's much easier to do it, you know, face-to-face than it is online. So we had to think through really carefully, you know, how would we design the course so that it would simulate to some extent that same experience. So thinking through, you know, how would we set up groups for students, how would they collaborate with one another, how many times do they need to post. One of the things that happened in the last course that I am designed, the Women's Studies 101 course, was, you know, I was sort of struggling with how much feedback I needed to give and how often I needed to be in the classroom and how much the students needed to post in order to ensure that they were meeting the learning outcomes. And the designer said to me, so when you're in a face-to-face setting, do you require students to provide evidence that they are participating in these discussions? And I said, well I can see that they're doing it. So no, I don't. And so she said, well, do you need them to do that online? You know, is it the experience that you want them to have, just having those conversations? Or do you actually want to see evidence that they're doing something for a grade? And I said, well, I really, it's all about the experience. I want them to share with one another. And so that was a really pivotal moment for me because I realized, oh, you know, this doesn't exactly translate. And in fact, what I'm doing in the face-to-face course, you know, makes a lot of sense. You know, this is all about engaging them with the content, getting them to make connections and meaning out of the things that they're learning. I don't need to give them a grade for that, you know? And so I had this like, ah, I probably don't need to do that in the online course either. And so I thought that that was really important because having that external perspective really shifted my ideas about what I wanted them to do online. And as a result, I've really changed how I've structured some of the courses in terms of assessment because I do want to privilege their experience and their engagement over, am I going to check this, you know, I completed this online discussion, I contributed something to it, so therefore I get a point. That's not really what teaching and learning is all about for me. So I think that was really important. Some strategies for creating effective online discussions are trying to figure out ways to, are trying to figure out effective ways to prompt the students to engage with the material. That's, and again, that's something that's really key to face-to-face courses as well. So I try to figure out ways to present my prompts in ways that are informal, but still get at the types of questions that I'm looking for the students to answer. So I try to figure out ways for them to sort of have a way into the material. So getting good feedback from the students is really, is the challenge and the other challenge is getting the students to interact with one another in their discussions because often what they'll do is, in my class, they'll respond to the prompt in a sort of singular way and every student will sort of create their own response rather than playing off one another. And that's a tough thing to manage because the students are coming to the discussions, they're coming to the boards at different times. So if they have a week to complete a discussion question, then they're not sort of interacting with one another in a rapid fire way. They're coming back to it, they're doing other courses. So it's tough to figure out ways to get them to respond to one another in that sense. But I found that just sort of reframing the question, jumping into the discussion myself is very helpful. Trying to find resources, YouTube clips or news sources that they can respond to, things that are current, I find generate really good discussions as well. So making sure that the prompt is good, making sure that there's some content linked to the prompt and trying to figure out ways to get them to respond to one another, those are the keys, I think, to developing good online discussions. One of the strategies I used was to divide them into smaller groups and give them something to talk about. So give them a YouTube video, for instance, that was related to the course content and a couple of guiding questions to get them going. Of course, if you just leave it like that, the keen students will hop right in and comment because they love the content of the course. But to get full participation, you often have to assign some sort of grade. And that can be a bit of a pain. On the other hand, when I tried to assign the grades, people did participate and I found the conversation to be quite useful. So one of the tricks I used was you get a grade for kind of posting a basic response, but you get additional grades for commenting and furthering the conversation and building on what others have said in your group. So that's one way for conversation. The other way at a broader class level is to direct them to post general questions to the entire class in a discussion forum so that they feel like they can answer each other and that it doesn't always come back to you, the instructor. And it helps you as an instructor because you don't get the same question 10 or 15 times. You say post it in the forum and as then maybe another student will chime in and then the little piece that you do as an instructor is congratulate the person who answered the question to encourage that behavior and hopefully reduce the number of times that you get direct emails on really general questions, like general course content questions.