Tip 3: Developing Great and Effective Questions

This e-coaching tip continues the topic of developing great  and effective questions for your online course. Last week's tip and FAQ focused on the use of discussion boards as a tool for building community. This week's four-question FAQ focuses on characteristics and topics of good questions, such as being open-ended, exploratory, and questions requiring students to "inquire within" about what they currently believe and 'know.' Be sure to peruse Questions #8 and #9 for examples you might find immediately useful. For example, Question #8 provides examples on how to frame discussion questions focusing on core concepts and Question #9 includes a list of examples for ideas for discussion board activities.

Here's just one additional insight to think about while developing questions. One of the core assumptions in the Constructivist educational philosophy is that

Knowledge depends on past constructions. We know the world through our mental framework and we transform and interpret new information through this framework.

This assumption highlights how important it is for us -- and for students themselves -- to think deeply about what they know or believe now because new knowledge is built on and integrated with what is already in the students' heads! For more on this, see the January 2006 article by Brian Muirhead in the online journal, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. www.itdl.org/Journal/jan_06/article02.htm

We hope you find a nugget of an idea that may prove insightful to you. If you find something useful and have a minute, write to Judith and Rita and ecoach@designingforlearning.info.

Next week's message will have Online Discussions -- Part Three of Three: Managing and Grading the Discussions

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E-Coaching Tips

Success Tip 3: Online Discussions -- Part Two of Three: Developing Effective Questions

6. How do I get started in creating and developing effective discussion questions?

Developing good questions for discussion boards takes practice. Often the most important thing to do is to start, and then work to refine questions over a course and over a set of courses. Students are often good sources of feedback and new questions.

Good online questions are generally open-ended and exploratory in nature, often requiring students to apply and integrate information from multiple resources, including one's work environments.

An easy way to get started is to simply post a question early in the course, asking students to share where they work, their personal goals for the course, or a personal leadership philosophy that they have found useful in their lives. The purpose of a first question can be twofold -- giving you practice in creating a question and also starting the sharing that is common in a learning community.

When doing workshops, a favorite technique is to ask the participants to share their favorite technology or to share a technology they might have in their pockets! No matter the question, interesting and fun responses ensue! This technique also works in discussion boards.

7. I have tried to use a range of questions -- from those that are very objective-based such as definitions and core processes to those that are more complex, following the well-known Bloom's Taxonomy. What are some of the basic types of questions and what types are best for discussion boards?

We like to think about questions in these three large categories:

• Factual content questions that can represent the "enablers" and data elements required for developing core concepts;
• Questions strategies based on the Socratic method that faculty will use with students and that students might use with other students on discussion boards and forums
• Problem-solving questions that intersect a student's zone of proximal development, core concept development and complex, customized learning

Here is a little more detail on these three types of questions.

Factual Questions

Factual questions are generally those questions for which there is a known answer. This includes short-answer essay questions, such as the pros and cons of different leadership types. These are often straightforward questions that are the foundations of more complex concepts. Students can generally apply these straightforward questions to their own professional environment. These include basic principles, guidelines and accepted practice. For these types of questions, students can also be asked to identify or find ideas from relevant topic resources.

Socratic Questions

Questions based on the Socratic method encourage students to "go within" themselves and clarify what is known to them and then to provide the assumptions behind their reasoning and even the data behind those assumptions. For example, some typical clarifying questions that can be incorporated into discussion questions and into question debriefings are:

• What is your main point? And how is it related to :.?
• What do you think is the main issue here?
• How does this relate to our discussion/problem/issue?
• What do you think John meant by his remark? What did you take John to mean? Jane, would you summarize in your own words what Richard has said? ... Richard, is that what you meant?
• Could you give me an example?

With the Socratic method students can take over the role of questioner, summarizer, and encourager, etc.

Problem-Solving Questions

Problem-solving experiences are generally good for the following situations:

• Useful for serious thinking about complex issues
• Useful for customizing learning and making it relevant to working professionals
• Able to incorporate challenges from current events and multidimensional issues
• Gets learners engaged and involved in real-world issues
• Use for learner projects, either individual or group
• Method of incorporating critical thinking

Problem-solving questions can also range from relatively straightforward scenarios in which the recommended strategies and solutions might be known, or well accepted, to those very complex scenarios in which answers and solutions are not known and in need of truly creative and innovative thinking. As faculty, we can be challenging our students to work on questions for which there are not known answers or strategies.

References on the three types of questions:

8. What about creating discussion questions that encourage discussion about some of the core concepts in a course?

As mentioned before, a good design approach for creating discussion questions is to base a question on one or more core concepts. These questions then can be foundation questions, providing opportunities for students to apply those concepts in different situations. The goal is to structure a question that leads students to think through the applications of those core concepts, hopefully resulting in useful knowledge.

Here are a couple of brief examples of discussion questions focusing on core concepts.

• Business case studies
• What types of marketing programs, etc work best for small businesses? For technology innovation companies?
• Translating a good idea into a company: What are the different ways of doing this?
• Biology/Genetics
• What if your doctor could choose medical treatments, guaranteed effective, based on your genetic makeup? <http://gslc.genetics.utah.edu/>
• History/Environment/Anatomy
• Students assume the role of an osteologist and are tasked with identifying the bones found by a farmer. <http://www.umuc.edu/virtualteaching/module1/problems.html>

9. What about some more examples that I could use to get started with discussion board activities?

Here are a few more ideas. Notice that this is a potpourri of ideas, including all levels of questioning. However, you may find an idea particularly well-suited to your content and desired skills and behaviors and knowledge of your students.

• Conduct opinion polls/surveys before assigned readings to arouse interest in topics and to assess and employ students' prior knowledge
• Create cognitive dissonance: Provoke discomfort, unsettle confirmed notions, uncover misconceptions, inspire curiosity, pose problems
• Assign writing-to-learn tasks as homework and/or discussion
• Present activities that require considering opposing views
• Assign a mediatory argument promoting a resolution acceptable to both sides
• Adapt collaborative and cooperative learning techniques, simulations, and role-plays to online uses
• Ask students to evaluate Internet resources
• Ask students to reflect on their responses to the course content and on their learning processes in private journals

This set of ideas has been abstracted from Bill Peirce, the Coordinator of a program for Reasoning across the Curriculum. See complete reference and url below.

Revised November 8, 2008
Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2008