BB discussion: one group of 30 or two groups of 15?

[downer]

The "expert" advice says that it is better to split discussion into groups of about 15 students rather than have big discussion groups.

Since I'm not particularly inclined to believe what the edu "experts" say about anything, I'm wondering whether it is really worth the effort.

Does anyone have direct experience of doing this with BB groups? BB is clunky and while I have used the "groups" function once, it was not particularly easy. I'm also worried that it will be more confusing for the students.

Advice and wisdom will be appreciated. Thanks.

[Katrina Gulliver]

Do you mean having a live conversation? Or using the BB discussion "forum" option which creates a discussion forum with threads like this one?

If the latter, I'd go with the whole group. It will be asynchronous - so you'll have it available over a number of days - and you'll have enough trouble getting participation going (this has been my experience). Rather than having 5 people each in the two groups adding to the discussion, better to have 10 people in one group.

[downer]

BB discussion forum. I never do anything live with online teaching.

[arcturus]

I'd recommend splitting into groups of 15. It depends on the type of questions you will ask, of course, but in my online class I get a lot of repetition of ideas. Whether that is students copying from those that have posted earlier, or just that there are not too many different ways to say the same thing is left to the reader to judge. Also, if you expect students to read and respond to other students posts, having too many in the group makes that more difficult (and time consuming). Your mileage may vary.

[polly_mer]

What is the goal of the discussion boards?

If the goal is lively interaction with give and take, then smaller is better because people can have real conversations.

If the goal is to get students to post something, anything, on the required schedule to demonstrate regular interactions between students for accountability purposes, then one big group is more likely to show anything, as bacardiandlime wrote.

[Hegemony]

Here's why discussions of 30 don't work. People have to respond to each other's posts for it to be a discussion — otherwise it's just a series of individual posts. So students will get on there and look at each other's initial posts, and start responding. If there are 15 initial posts, they may well scroll down through 10 or 12 before finding one they want to respond to, so most of them will get a response. But if there are 30 initial posts, because there are 30 students, the students will not read all 30 before starting to respond. So the students who post later, like posts number 20-30 of the initial posts, will be at the bottom and won't get many if any responses.

Now imagine that people have each made 2-3 responses to others' posts. If there are 15 students, that means 30-45 posts altogether. If there are 30 students, that means 60-90 posts altogether. If there are 60 posts+responses up, students are definitely not going to scroll all the way down to the bottom before starting. This means that the last 10 or so initial posts will be almost completely ignored, which is demoralizing to the students and bad for the discussion. Also, a discussion board of 90 posts is just plain overwhelming for everyone. They will give up trying to read through it all and just spot-read.

Better if the groups are smaller and they each feel involved in the whole thing.  I make my groups around 8-10 students, 12 at the outside.

[downer]

Thanks all, that makes sense.

I find it rare for intro students to actually engage in discussion, esp in intro courses. Generally interactive posts are "yay! I totes agree!" or "Great thoughts! I loved what you said." Sometimes one will offer a modification of another's view, but there's rarely any follow up.

Obviously I could structure assignments around getting genuine discussion, but that may distract from learning the content. It also gives me more work to do, and since this was a previously scheduled real-time class that was converted to online, I'm not so optimistic about the readiness of the students to step up to the online experience.

I'm thinking I may try smaller group discussion as an experiment for a couple of modules and see how it goes.

[arcturus]

As a practical matter, if you only have 30 students, you might use a single group for the first discussion (often an "introduce yourself" type post) and break them up subsequently. Canvas has a groups feature that randomly separates the class into whatever sized groups you would like. Unfortunately, it does not automatically add students to groups who add the class after the groups have been set. This means that I spend the first week of the semester (drop/add week) monitoring the students who add my course and manually placing them into groups that have space because other students have dropped the course.  Once the groups have been set, I keep them the same way for the entire semester so that students have a small subset of the class that they can get to know through discussion.  Of course, I have more than 100 students in my online class, so I do decide to have them in groups from the beginning (thus the annoyance of monitoring add/drop), but I can definitely see the benefit of having that first post be for the entire class, particularly if you are planning on re-forming the groups for each discussion.

[Katrina Gulliver]

If the goal is to get students to post something, anything, on the required schedule to demonstrate regular interactions between students for accountability purposes, then one big group is more likely to show anything, as bacardiandlime wrote.

Yes, this is my situation. For in-person classes that have moved online, I'm struggling to get more than a handful to engage at all.  Obviously YMMV, as Hegemony's example of students all posting every week describes.

[HigherEd7]

I tried groups one semester and if students do not respond it is a total nightmare. Then you will have students who do not understand the process etc...............etc...............

[arcturus]

Interesting. As I posted elsewhere, Discussions are a very low percentage of the student's grade in my online GenEd science course. Nonetheless, I usually get 90% of the students to post something every week. I have discussion groups of 10-12, randomly assigned at the beginning of the semester. I usually have one group that is very slow to have the first post, but ultimately every group has a reasonable set of postings by the due date (I leave discussions open for further postings, but only those posted by the due date are eligble for points).

This success may be related to the type of Discussion questions I ask. I am not trying to replicate a face-to-face animated discussion, which wouldn't happen in the type of class I am teaching in any event. Rather, I am using the discussions to connect what we are learning in the course to student's lives/future careers (one of the goals of a GenEd science class is to help students recognize the importance of science in their lives) and to engage with some of the more difficult concepts in a low stakes assignment.  Thus, most of the Discussion posts are student opinions with no correct/incorrect answer. Since it is low stakes, I grade with the equivalent of check, check plus, zero.

[Hegemony]

Here's how you make discussions that work.

Make discussion posts required and graded. I post one discussion question per unit. Then from students I require one substantial post in response (4 points), and two substantial responses to others' posts (2 points each). Substantial responses require real engagement and ideas, not just "I agree!" or "Great post!"

Check the little box that makes them "threaded" discussions, so students can reply to each other efficiently. Require that they post their first response by halfway through the unit, to keep them from all waiting till the end to start, and then having no posts to respond to. So if your unit runs Monday-Sunday, require that they post their first post by Thursday, and their two responses by Sunday.

For each unit, pose an open-ended question that allows them to integrate the material. Questions where there is a "right" and a "wrong" are not useful.  An open-ended question might be something like "Our novel is full of people who pretend to be aiming for this or that, but who actually have their own hidden agenda. Pick one character in one scene from this week's reading and theorize about what he or she actually, secretly wants. How is that revealed in their actions? Describe what you think they want and how their actions reveal this."

[Katrina Gulliver]

I tried groups one semester and if students do not respond it is a total nightmare. Then you will have students who do not understand the process etc...............etc...............

Exactly.

Yes, if participation were mandatory/graded I'm sure that would make a big difference. That's not my situation (they are only graded on final exams/essays - we don't grade on participation for F2F classes, so we can't grade on it for online now).

[polly_mer]

Obviously I could structure assignments around getting genuine discussion, but that may distract from learning the content.

Can you give an example of this situation?  How can genuine discussion distract from the content?  Are they not discussing the content to help expand and reinforce the content?

[arcturus]

Yes, if participation were mandatory/graded I'm sure that would make a big difference. That's not my situation (they are only graded on final exams/essays - we don't grade on participation for F2F classes, so we can't grade on it for online now).

This is bonkers. Students respond to assignments that are graded - it indicates that the instructor thinks that it is important to do this, whatever "this" is. Fundamentally, a good online class will have different components than a good face-to-face class. The mode of delivery does make a difference. The one sure way to have a bad online experience is to do exactly the same things as in a face-to-face class with no recognition that you get default engagement by students showing up to a room at a specified date/time.  To get similar engagement in an online class, you need to have something (graded) that makes it clear that they need to engage with the material regularly. Discussions are one way to do that.