Online Course Peer Review

I love online class discussions. When I first started teaching online, I think I might have tried to respond to just about every student post. I wanted studentsto know I was there and reading what they’d written. Of course, I quickly learned to stop being so annoying! Still, as I serve on peer review teams and continue to take online courses, I see that instructors often do not get involved with class discussions at all. As an online student, I start to wonder whether or not the instructor even takes the time to read the discussion postings if I haven’t heard from him/her for weeks and weeks. I think the tendency then for students is to not take the time to do a really good job with a discussion—just post to post and fulfill the discussion requirement for the number of overall postings needed. While we, as instructors, should definitely not respond to every student post, or even every other post, facilitating a discussion by letting students see that we are involved is valuable and important to the learning process. Discussions are all about learning from one another, so let’s stay involved!