Teaching Talk: Replacing LMS Discussion Boards with "Monolinks" in an Online Course
Virtual Zoom Session (Recording option)
The dreaded, threaded discussion! A staple of fully online courses, students compose a short post and “phone in” two low-effort replies by their 11:59pm deadline. In this Teaching Talk, Sarah McCorkle will share the results of her Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project.
As an instructor, I hated the discussion board format. I switched my weekly discussion assignments to a technique called “Monolinks.” Students composed their weekly assignment (now with the look and feel of a “paper”) inside of their individual Google Doc, then visited the Google Docs of others and discussed using the Comments feature within Google Docs. In this talk, I’ll share the results of an IRB approved SoTL study on student perceptions of the Monolinks activity and elaborate on my experience facilitating Monolinks compared to a traditional discussion board. After this course concluded, I continued to have students approach me and say what an impact this course had on them as teachers and digital citizens. I do not believe that my students would have experienced this type of transformation if their creativity and motivation to write had been stifled by returning to another traditional discussion board in an LMS.
Thursday, March 12 from 11:00 – 12:00
- Recording will be made available to those who register
- Zoom Registration Required