Contributed to the TLCo-op by Alina Holmes, Graduate Research Assistant of the Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment, 2020.

Discussion looks very different online than it may look in your traditional classroom setting. However, that doesn’t mean that the conversations students have online can’t be just as meaningful to their learning and growth in a subject area. This article offers six different strategies to setting-up and creating good online virtual discussions. Two other strategies we also encourage is providing students with different roles within the discussion if is synchronous, and laying out discussion norms before the discussion takes place that address which comments will not be tolerated.

Image Attribution: “This work” by Markéta Machová, Pixabay is in the Public Domain, CC0