Overview

This page gives you two videos to start with on designing and facilitating discussion forums in general. Then you can watch a video on how to create and grade discussion forums in Canvas.

Design Effective Online Discussion Forums | Video 1 of 2

Online discussion forums can be a great way to engage students in the online learning space, however, if they're so useful why is it that students often don't engage with them? In this video, we're going to look at how you can design your discussion forums with opportunities for higher-order thinking and better student engagement. In this video (5.53min) Chris Tuffnell introduces how to design effective forums.

Link to film on Youtube.

Facilitate Effective Online Discussion Forums | Video 2 of 2

This video from Chris Tuffnell (7.10 min) builds on effective utilisation by offering considerations and tips for effectively facilitating online discussion forums to engage your learners.

Direct to the video on Youtube

Practical tips for engaging students via online forums:

Flower Darby, in a video (15 minutes) for Digitally Enhanced Education Webinars, gives tips for how to engage students via online forum.

Link to video on Youtube.

Setting Up Discussion Posts in Canvas

In this video (20 minutes) Ashlee Espinosa shows you in detail how to create a discussion forum and how to grade discussion forums.

Go to the Youtube video on Ashlee's channel

Canvas Guides

Canvas (Instructure) own guides

Creating a Discussion in Canvas
Creating a Group Discussion in Canvas
Allowing Students to Attach Files to a Discussion