Flexible Learning

Reflection on Asynchronous Online Discussion (AOD)

Abstract
Asynchronous Online Discussion (AOD) has become one of the preferred teaching strategies by many educators worldwide in the last few years. The nature of AOD offers great learning opportunity, as it may help enhance the participation of students who might be less willing to participate in traditional face-to-face classroom settings due to shyness; and it has the potential to encourage more thoughtful responses since participants can take their own time in composing their thoughts (Cheung & Hew, 2006). While AOD allows students to exchange ideas at any place at any time, it also posts many challenges to educators, particularly on content analysis and students’ participation.

Methodology
I have the opportunity to be among 25 students from MINDEF to have engaged in AOD while we were attending the “Planning & Designing Flexible Learning” course at NIE from August 25 to August 29, 2008. Two discussion topics, “What place does foreign talents have in Singapore?” and “How would you view them in your pursuit of a second career?” were posted by our lecturer and we were encouraged to participate in open discussions. To facilitate active participation, all postings were kept anonymous.

Benefits
AOD allows students to stay in touch with their community, without being limited by geographical boundaries. It encourages students to exchange views on selected topics and in the process, learn from each other’s sharing. AOD also allows students to clarify doubts and answer immediate questions rather than waiting to meet face-to-face. In my opinion, the most significant benefit of AOD is that it promotes active interaction that is limited and constrained in face-to-face instruction, especially for students who are shy and don't normally speak up in class.
During AOD, everyone has an equal opportunity to express his/her views. Keeping postings anonymous is a practical approach to encourage students to actively participate in discussion and freely express their views.

One’s thinking and opinions are visible to the rest in the same community during AOD. Generally, most of the inputs are of better quality because contributors can take their time to think and draft their inputs. Some students even attach URL links to relevant articles to support their claims. Through these healthy exchanges, students can improve their writing and thinking skills, and there would be substantial learning by virtue of reading the quality work that others produced.

From these few days of participation in AOD, it is evident that AOD could also be a platform for brainstorming of ideas. It promotes thinking about ideas in a more connected and continuous fashion, and allows students to build on others’ ideas.

Challenges
The most challenging task in using AOD as an instructional tool is to ensure every student is comfortable and know how to participate in AOD. Ground rules must be clearly articulated and enforced so that students do not engage in “personal attacks” or discussing something which are drifted from the discussion topic. From the viewpoint of a lecturer, I think it would be a challenge to balance providing direction without stifling students’ creativity.

Next, substantive extends of preparation time is needed before fruitful AOD could take place. Besides teaching the students how to use the discussion board, the lecturer also requires to spend time creating individual accounts and to ensure that the identities of the students are kept anonymous. Time is also invested to guide the students through warm-up activities before they proceed to the actual AOD topics.

Crafting of an interesting thread/topic is crucial to stir students’ interest to participate in discussion. It would be good to have very clear and specific discussion topic, with the end state or desired outcomes in mind, so that students would stay focused during discussions.

As witnessed during the few days of AOD exercise, it would be difficult for the lecturer to ensure full active participation from all the students despite setting the ground rules. There were some students who were extremely active and dominating, while some were just inactive judging from the number of postings and replies. It is therefore essential in an instructional setting to impose grading for AOD to oblige active participation from all students.

After all, I think the most challenging task of the lecturer is how to assess the students’ participation and contributions. Should it be based on quantity or quality? Moreover, it is really time-consuming to read through all the students’ postings. In this aspect, the lecturer could impose strict rules that all postings should be kept simple and straightforward, and there should be only one salient point in each posting. These rules would also discourage long-winded postings, which other students would require longer time to read, digest and understand. In most cases, students would choose to ignore those long-winded postings.

Conclusion
While there are many challenges when employing AOD in instruction, this teaching strategy has proven its worth in getting students to engage in open discussion on selected topics, thus widen their knowledge base and enhance their ability in conceptual thinking, which covers critical thinking, creative thinking and ethical reasoning. More importantly, AOD provides the flexibility for students to learn from each other at any place at any time. In planning and designing flexible learning, educators should never forget to include AOD in their instruction package.