Discussions

E-Learning for Educators found participants engaged in discussions during each module. In addition to participating, the students were required to lead discussions. By encouraging “value added” responses the instructor and materials modeled and gave students experience creating discussions in which there was a compelling reason to read and respond.

The intent of the discussion I led was to engage participants with a “real-world” situation and to encourage participants to consider how they might respond to it. With the prompt, I sought to facilitate participants’ approaching the problem from different perspectives.

Participants seemed to propose quite a few solutions that were aligned with their experiences and perspectives, so I was not as successful as I had hoped in facilitating participants’ understanding of the different approaches to this problem. In the future, I intend to provide more details of the “contrary” viewpoint.

This screenshot captures the prompt I used to begin the discussion I led:

sample discusion prompt