Students value their instructors’ participation in online discussions, but ongoing participation is not always an option because of the amount of work involved, particularly if there are a large number of students and/or discussions.
One way to maintain participation without it becoming too much work is to send students discussion board summaries, highlighting the key points that students made.
Since discussions in her courses are similar from term to term, Hayley Lake, lecturer at Eastern Washington University, saves her weekly discussion summaries and reuses them with necessary adjustments each term.
This reduces her workload while providing students with the same level of instructor participation as if she wrote a unique summary for each discussion each time she taught the course.
