Many online discussion forums are a drudgery for students to write and a drudgery for instructors to grade. A discussion strategy that aligns with the Universal Design for Learning framework can alleviate these struggles and provide rich student-student interaction. Yellowdig is one tool that can help.
Many online instructors find fostering meaningful student-student interaction in asynchronous environments to be particularly challenging. Traditional LMS-based forums are often the tool of choice, but the results fall flat - instructors don’t feel these activities perform well at combating isolation or helping students with collaborative meaning-making. In this interactive session, participants will compare traditional online discussion forums to newer platforms (represented by Yellowdig) through the lens of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), in order to explore how online discussions may be made more impactful. By the end of the session, participants will be able to describe why UDL is a useful framework to use when creating online discussion opportunities and will have had practice evaluating how well a discussion activity aligns with UDL principles. Participants will also leave with familiarity about a newer discussion platform, Yellowdig. Participants can expect to interact through activities like small group discussion / think-pair-share, polls, and simulation exercises.