By: Saije Rusimovici, Staff Writer
We’ve all had that one professor who insists on having students complete a weekly discussion board. It can feel exceedingly tedious and time consuming to participate in Canvas discussion boards. Whether the posts serve as a reading comprehension assignment or are meant to spark conversation between classmates, it often feels like a chore rather than a meaningful activity that stimulates our learning.
A discussion prompt might ask students to respond with whether they agree with a particular argument. Responses often are filled with lacklustre “I agrees” from people who regurgitate the points their classmates made, often due to time constraints from prioritizing larger assignments. For this reason, discussion boards are rarely productive — they are just another assignment we need to tick off our to-do lists.
Standard discussion assignments aren’t an effective way for students to learn. With new AI tools that can summarize text instantly, students can quickly fill discussion board prompts without another thought. When discussions can simply be answered by asking a chatbot to summarize information and come up with a response, they no longer have a meaningful impact on the learning experience. Especially when these discussions are then translated into participation grades that add up to a decent chunk of a student’s grade, there can be more effective ways to engage students.
Any discussion, whether in-person or online, should no longer focus on regurgitating information or summarizing sources. This doesn’t determine a student’s understanding or comprehension of the discussion topics. Students have tools that will do their work for them now, so the learning environment should adapt to prevent misuse of new technology.
Discussions should instead be a place for students to be curious, and establish genuine connections to the material. It would be beneficial to use Canvas discussions for conversation and asking questions rather than a graded assignment that anyone could submit a generated response to. Many professors use discussion boards as a resource for their students, and sometimes facilitate learning by asking their own specific questions to students. This creates a much more engaging environment rather than a “question of the week” assignment that we see in many courses. Prompts could also be shifted from asking students to summarize materials to questions that can be answered by sharing personal experiences or stories that connect to the material.
We need to reimagine how we use Canvas. For such a flexible technology, there’s so much more we can use it for to facilitate learning.
