ETEC 674, Session 9, Discussion

Online discussions are an important part of many online classes and an important part of general Internet communication. Use what you have learned from the text and your own investigation to respond to the following items.

1. Identify three different technologies that support discussions in online classes. Describe each technology in terms of its ability to support worthwhile and rewarding discussions.

1. Forum: a forum is an asynchronous electronic discussion that allows participants can participate at any time or locations they want. The forum has a facilitator, the facilitator reviews the post before it published and consults with the student who posted to make sure the post related to the topic, and the post is appropriate to discussion policies. Students can participate in a discussion in easy way, they only need to click on the forum topic itself to active a text box in which a response may be typed. This kind of discussion supports thoughtful responds because students usually take more time writing that allows them think more carefully and looking into different resource before thy post their threat.

2. Chat: a chat is synchronous electronic discussion. It has a topic. In chat. All participants or students must participate in the chat session in the same time. It is called as well areal time chat. Unlike in forum, in chat activities students do not have a long time to think about their post and look into resource to construct their posts, they need to respond immediately to their peers or instructor posts. The chat has a moderator. The prime responsibility of the moderators is to control who has the wright to post his or her post in certain time.

3. Facebook Group: Facebook group is a real time discussion board with notifications.  The factors which make Facebook such a popular tool for social media can also make it a highly effective means of fostering interaction among instructor-student and student-student. In Facebook student can create Facebook documents inside the group. And thy can post link. Video, photos and other stuff. What is make the Facebook an active technology to hold discussion activities is that you can set the Facebook to send you a notification massage if a new post has made. And Facebook has smartphone applications that make it available anywhere any time which support a quick and active respond.   

http://isuwriting.com/2013/01/04/facebook-groups-the-real-time-discussion-board-with-notifications/#more-1737

2. Describe an eLearning context (type of class, students, and specific content) where you would advocate the use of an online discussion. Identify the technology you would use to facilitate the discussion.

Type of class: I am conducting right now discussion activities for an online training course about Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Student: The discussion activity is designed for trainees who are   high school and university students,   graphic design, media, art students, people who work in the field of press and journalism, and people who are interesting in photography and design.

Content : content of discussion Mostly will be about the color system and common photo problems that can fixed by Adobe Photoshop Elements.

In this discussion activities I would prefer to use discussion technology that supported by LMS/CMS such as Blackboard that supported by educational organization. However in these activities I am planning to use Google Doc to support conduct this activity  

3. Describe how you would plan for the discussion described in question 2. For example, how would you prepare students for the discussion, structure associated presentations, plan other activities that students be doing along with the discussion, and how you would ensure that the student workload was balanced and appropriate.

I preparation for discussion activities i will firs need to make sure that all student are familiar with the technology that will be used to hold the discussion. I will prepare students by conducting an online session to explain the technology and ask student to create their one count on Google. I will set and establish the discussion policies and explain them to student in the orientation session. To encourage students’ participation and critical thinking I will create open ended questions and give the student to post unlimited number of resource, links, videos, and photos.

4. Develop a set of guidelines or policies that you would give to students to help them engage successfully in the discussion.

These are an example of guidelines and policies that I would give to student to participate in the discussion.

§  A discussion can last for 3 days.

§  Include in your post graphics, photos, videos and, links.

§  Use respectful and appropriate language in your responses.

§  You are expected to respond to each other

§  Use email to send a private message.

5. Describe and/or develop a system for assessing student participation and learning in the discussion.

These are rubrics that a developed to assess students participation and learning in the discussion activities.

	3	2	1
Quality of Post	Appropriate posts and comments thoughtful and Reflective of good effort.	Appropriate posts and comments thoughtful and Reflective of acceptable  effort	Responds, but with minimum effort.
Relevance Of Post	Posts topics that fully related To discussion topic  prompts further discussion of topic.	Posts topics that are mostly related to discussion content	Posts topics that do not relate to the discussion
Engagement with others	Shows significant  effort to engage with others Responds.	Shows attention to other posts in the discussion.	Offers little Interaction with other posts.
Language	There is no misspelled word or grammatical error in the postings.	There are few misspellings and/or grammatical errors.	There are many misspellings and/or grammatical errors
Discussion  instruction	The posts completely follow  instructions and time requirements	The majority of the posts completely follow  instructions and time requirements	The majority of the posts completely follow  instructions and time requirements

6. How would you prepare the instructor for participating in the discussion?

Instructors must be aware of his role in the discussion activities. Even if he or she will not engage in the activities he or she must monitors the activities and guide it to the goals. Instructors can question student or give them feedback on their response if he feels the discussion is going somewhere. Before that student must be familiar with the instructor role and what they expect from him.