Presentation Software Assignment – New

Literacies

Hayden SheridanEric Davidson

Online Class Discussions

• Online class discussions serve as a collaboration area for the students in the class to post their own discussion about a certain class topic or rubric. Additionally, they serve as a great tool for students to reply to each other's threads and engage in an intelligent and sometimes heated debate.

D2L Discussions

• Many classes at the University of Arizona frequently use the discussions tab on the D2L website.

• Attached is an example of a discussion group from this class.

• https://d2l.arizona.edu/d2l/le/365426/discussions/topics/351401/View

Benefits of Online Discussions

• Online discussion rooms allow for direct communication between students and teaching staff in remote locations.

• Online rooms allow students to share media from internet resources.

• Collaboration and discussion can be carried out without time limits.

Drawbacks for Online Discussions

• While the Internet is a great teaching resource in classrooms today, sometimes students need face to face interaction in order to be truly challenged intellectually. Discussions in person force the student to think on his or her feet.

• Time lapses and forgetfulness can cause online rooms to be difficult to manage and difficult to extract value from.

Current Outlook

• Online rooms are often blended with traditional in class learning.

• Discussions can be created and responses to questions pooled in large lectures of a few hundred people.

• Online discussion allows for direct communication with professors in these large lecture environments.

Online Discussion in the Future

• Many schools are transitioning to online education at an increasing rate.

• Online discussion is becoming the standard method of communication in these online classes.

Methods of Online Discussion

• School e-mails

• Forums

• Message Boards

• Video and Photo Sharing