Even in the Before Times, requiring students to contribute to online discussions was part of the teaching toolkit for many of us. Now it’s nearly de rigueur across all our disciplines. If reading classroom forums feels tedious at times, here is one idea that might bring back the glow: rather than generic instructions such as “write an initial post and then respond to two of your classmates’ posts,” see if you can craft a prompt that forces students to make an interesting decision/choice and defend it, drawing upon course material. When they are responding to their peers, they could be invited to identify the most compelling aspect of the argument, or the juiciest word choice, or the course reading that doesn’t seem to have been considered in the formulation of an assertion. This might help shift the nature of students’ responses from simply “I agree/disagree” and parroting the readings to reactions that make for more gripping thinking and reading on everyone’s parts. It’s difficult to conceive of any subject matter that is truly morally or ethically neutral, so inviting students to take a stand on a thorny authentic problem—and defend it using actual facts—could flow naturally from just about any discipline. Initial prompts can be tweaked to fit your subject from stems such as “Given x reality, should Ted choose y or z path of action?” “Is Barney or Robin more likely to be successful in this scenario—how do you know?” “What song lyric from your Spotify list best captures the essence of this article—why do you say that?”
In addition to helping learners become conversant in the academic language of your discipline, an exercise such as this one helps answer the question “when am I ever going to use this new knowledge in real life?”