Update
Acadly now has Zoom integration! You can watch the demo video here. Everything you’re about to read in the blog post below can be done during Zoom classes on Acadly.
Online Class Discussions are the most versatile activities to engage students
During our product demonstrations, we’re often asked certain questions about the Discussion activity type on Acadly.
- How do you suppose one can teach and read student comments at the same time?
- What could be the pedagogical use of a discussion inside a classroom?
- Would online discussions not cannibalize verbal and spoken participation?
- I use polls and quizzes for grading. How can discussions be used for the same purpose?
So, for today’s blog post, we thought we would focus on these themes.
But first, a big shout out to our readers!
August 29, 2019: Last week, to our pleasant surprise, we found that we’re back in Medium’s list of Top Writers in Education. To all our readers — we are grateful to you all 😭
To the good folks at Medium — your support for writers around the world is amazing ❤
We have been asked why our company blog is on Medium, and the reason is you! (Also, because we really like your italicized font)
About us
Acadly is a Student Response System and Attendance Automation platform, built specifically for higher education. It is free for professors and students and professors from over 1900 universities have signed up for Acadly so far.
How do you suppose one can teach and read student comments at the same time?
There are two great ways to summarize the gist of an online discussion so that you can zero in on the highlights.
1. Word Clouds
Word Clouds are an amazing way to summarize the dominant themes and trends of any discussion. Don’t worry about individual comments — you can always go back and read them later on.
On Acadly, the Word Cloud updates dynamically once every few comments. You can read about our Word Cloud feature in detail here.
2. The Social Way
You can also ask students to make the Q&A social and react with “likes” (or whatever your discussion platform’s equivalent of a “like” is.) This way, you can read the 2–3 most popular questions/ comments inside the classroom.
What could be the pedagogical use of a discussion inside a classroom?
While the pedagogical use of any activity depends, to an extent, on how it is used, there are some universally acknowledged benefits of using discussions:
- Online discussions democratize students’ voices. Verbal discussions have been criticized for moving the class’ focus to the ‘usual suspects’ who tend to speak up in class more often than the others.
- When there are no right or wrong answers, discussions have an edge over polls. If the objective is to collect the classroom’s opinions, rather than asking students to choose from a set of predefined options, it’s usually better to ask them to respond in an open-ended manner. Again, options like Acadly’s Word Clouds can be used to summarize the responses visually.
- Unlike verbal discussions, online discussions can be continued after class hours. The benefit of having at least a part of the in-class discussion online is in this huge factor. Any channel that helps you achieve something that was previously impossible, is bound to have a net positive impact on the overall value they create.
- Online discussions help students transition to richer ways of participation… which brings us to the next point.
Would online discussions not cannibalize verbal and spoken participation?
On the contrary, research shows that backchannels (online Q&A in the classroom) help boost participation in the front-channel as well. In other words, if you ask students to ask questions online, this will actually increase the number of questions asked verbally, since the “backchannel enhances front-channel discourse as students contribute helpful comments that clarify, expand on, or give examples of ideas that are expressed aloud by others.”
We have covered this point, among others, in our infographic on Backchanneling:
I use polls and quizzes for grading. How can discussions be used for the same purpose?
While this cannot be said to be universally true, some discussion platforms quantify the volume and quality of participation for you, and this can be used to make custom grading rubrics too.
Of course, Acadly is one of those platforms! You would be able to view the following statistics about discussion participation on Acadly:
- Name of the students
- Number of comments
- Number of comments “liked” and “thanked”
- Number of comments “rewarded” by an instructor
- Total number of reward points accumulated
- Number of comments by activity type
You can learn more about how to export data from Acadly here.
Sign up for Acadly
Hope you enjoyed this week’s infographic and blog post. We’ll see you soon with the next story in this series. If you’re interested, you can sign up for Acadly here.
