Enhancing Online Discussions: An Improvement Science Approach

To innovate is to make a change in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products (Oxford Online Dictionary, 2019). Unfortunately, it is often the practice of organizations to approach problems with intensity over consistency (Sinek, 2017), where change is framed and valued as done quickly with a burst of resources as opposed to planned slowly with intention. While the immediate impact of an intense response may appear or even feel successful, it tends to occur at the expense of long-term, sustained improvement. Under these conditions, organizations spend less time planning and reflecting, and more time doing, which can lead to siloed work that doesn’t yield the intended nor needed improvements. 

 

At our organization, creating online, asynchronous discussion forums that elicit meaningful interactions between instructors and students, as well as students and their peers, has been a continued problem of practice.  More, monitoring and providing meaningful feedback to faculty has provided an added challenge to identifying and developing effective instructional behaviors in the forum.  First, how is meaningful defined in an online environment? Second, how is meaningful measured in a way that captures and then provides opportunities to optimize student and faculty interactions? The balance between student needs, faculty practices, and organizational initiatives underscores the challenges many online organizations confront in the face of innovation.  

 

What (or whose) needs should teams prioritize for improvement? Oftentimes, leaders take an insular approach to change; They waver between doing and acting while missing fundamental questions that arise during critical stages of planning and reflecting.  How will teams know planned changes made the intended difference? While seemingly counterintuitive, going slow to go fast works. In response to our problem of practice, we adopted a strategic approach that equitably respected each step of an improvement cycle, and, as a result, have observed both intended and needed improvements. 

 

By leveraging the OLC Quality Course Teaching and Instructional Practice Scorecard, the Carnegie Foundations Six Principles of Improvement and following a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, we redefined change through action research in our online discussion forums. 

 

We started with two simple questions: What is our organization trying to accomplish? What is the purpose of our discussion forum? We set the stage of the PDSA cycle by first establishing a statement of purpose for the online discussion forum: discussions that create more academic-related conversation, where students apply personal experience to building new knowledge, consider other perspectives, and engage meaningfully with the instructor and their peers. Then, we assembled a cross-functional team of stakeholders to fully commit to the improvement cycle approach. It required us to knock down walls and build bridges, not only between curriculum and instruction, but between education and compliance. As a result, we observed the changes we intended and needed within a reasonable timeframe, with the necessary buy-in and input to ensure changes are fully adopted, implemented effectively, and then sustained over time. 

 

In this workshop, participants will learn how our organization followed an improvement science approach to enhance online discussion forums, by illustrating two critical steps of the PDSA cycle within cross-functional groups: planning and reflecting.  Participants will practice applying the full framework through simulated scenarios with a focus on these steps. They will take with them the framework as well as a prioritized problem of practice they can implement the approach at their organization.