DOCUMENT by: ESC Training
Subject: Track and Respond to Student Discussions

Because adult learners benefit from thoughtful discussion with others, most Empire State College courses have carefully constructed discussion questions throughout the course. Course designers set specific expectations about the quality and quantity of student participation. As an instructor, one of your roles is to facilitate the discussion. You will participate selectively in discussion threads. You should not create a response to every student posting. The discussion will build more naturally if you simply respond to occasional postings, or periodically post to summarize and guide the discussion. Also, never respond within the student posting. Instead use the Respond icon.

The discussion questions are generally located in a Discussion Area section of a Learning Module, usually toward the bottom of the module menu because in active courses the discussion menu can grow quite large. By locating discussions at the bottom of the module, you can access other module documents without having to scroll through all the discussion items.

Discussion starter documents (i.e., where students go to view and respond to the original discussion question) are identified by the blue and purple icon showing three figures to the left of the document title in the module menu: .