I am teaching a new online course this spring.  In many ways, I feel as if I am stepping outside my comfort zone because the curriculum I am teaching is not my own, and there are many things I will be doing in this online course that are not at all like what I’ve been doing in my other online courses.  I’m teaching using Moodle for only the second time, and group discussion will be a much bigger component of this course than my other online courses in that students will have at least one (if not two) group discussion activities per week, and they will sometimes only have three days to complete a discussion activity.

One new thing I’m going to try involves giving students some choices in terms of how they work together in discussion groups.  Rather than require all students to post messages in discussion rooms (or forums), I will leave it up to different groups to figure out what will work best for that group, whether it be posting messages back and forth asynchronously, engaging in synchronous chat (either in Moodle chat rooms or using something like Google chat), or even meeting in person to work through activities if they want to (and if that is feasible).  Another new thing I’m doing–in order to figure out how to best divide students into smaller groups–involves polling the students during the first week of the semester to find out more about (a) when they feel they will have time to work through discussion activities (and when they prefer to work through such activities), and (b) how they think they would like to engage in discussion (i.e., using discussion forums, chat tools, Skype, email, etc.).

I’m really excited to see what the students want to do and how it will work to give them these choices.  I’m hoping, in the long run, this will give them more of a sense of ownership and control over their learning, and, hopefully, this will be a good thing.