One thing that I’ve attempted in a past course is to provide students with an open space where they can informally post responses to a question. Students could post whatever they liked: from their thoughts and experiences to links to you-tube videos, online news articles, and academic journal article. Because some students will likely be more familiar with the topic than others, there’s a wide range of responses. The benefit of this is that students then learn from one anther – which is the stated purpose of the space. The downside of this is that students may feel as though they have a lot on their plate already, which is less of an issue in a self-paced courses but still there nonetheless.

One caveat is that students’ contributions are NOT evaluated (i.e., graded). I find that when you evaluate students the space changes for them and for you. The space also cannot be left so open that students don’t know what to do with it. I find that this is the case with the Student Café forum in each of my online courses, which remain unused.

So, instead of an open-ended forum, one thing I could do is provide a shared space where we (the students and I) can add resources that help with understanding of challenging concepts, and be enable students to understand how the information can be applied to wider world – from student examples to current events – and thus explain why the content is relevant in the first place.