1.5 Facilitating Discussion

Learning Objective: Faculty can name RSI practices that meet federal guidelines and Highline College RSI review criteria.

Introduction

There are four categories of substantive interaction as defined by the federal regulations. On this page, we'll continue looking at each category in detail and sharing examples of how to engage in those practices. We'll also provide links to pages from EdTech's Online Teaching course that describe related pedagogical practices in more detail.

The definition of RSI specifies that each week, interaction with students must include at least two of the following:

direct instruction / proactively inviting students to connect;
assessing or providing feedback on a student’s coursework within a reasonable amount of time (as defined in the syllabus);
providing information or responding to questions about the content of a course; or
facilitating a group discussion regarding the content of a course."

Facilitating a Group Discussion

Group discussions can happen in Zoom, Canvas discussion boards, collaborative editing of a Google document, and or in other tools and formats. In order to be considered RSI compliant, the interactions need to be substantive (about the content) and you must participate in the discussion or collaboration. Your responses to students should include analysis, recommendations, and/or redirects that help the discussion, and students' understanding progress.

You do need to be careful. You want to let students push the conversation and reply to the thinking of others, but to be an RSI-compliant practice, you also need to active in the discussion. One technique is offer additional resources, ask follow-up questions, or offer summaries of discussion board trends. You should make sure you are responding to a representative number of students in the course.

RSI documentation can include the comments and participation in the flow of the discussion or in Speedgrader. As noted above the comments should be substantive, e.g. clarifications, responses, or extensions of the topic in the discussion, regardless of where they are delivered. And, you need to ensure that you are responding to a representative number of students. Responding to just one or two students in a discussion would not be considered meeting the guidelines.

When you document your examples from this category, you will need to demonstrate that you have responded to between three and five students in a substantive way during the discussion, but your actual interactions should include the bulk of the students in the class.

One note: If you are giving feedback about how to improve the discussion (that a person's comment in the discussion did not meet the criteria or how they could make their response to someone else stronger), that would be part of the category of “Providing Feedback," not "Participating in the Discussion." [This is a small distinction, but since you need to do something from two different categories, this is important.]

Examples

Example

"Great question, {Student}. One way I like to think about rhetorical devices is who am I talking to and what type of evidence do I want to use to get to my final goal. How about other people? Do you think about the audience first or the evidence first?"

"Hi class, this discussion thread has been so impressive. There have been two large arguments that have come from the conversations. One is "are we more free when society has boundaries set by values and social norms or are we more free when society has boundaries enforced by authority." The other theme is "who should be in charge of responding when social norms are violated?" These are both such interesting themes and people should refer back to these as you work on your writing assignment 2. You can use the ideas from the discussion and from your peers to further your argument."

Non-Example

"Thanks for that comment, {Student}.

This is not substantive because it does not provide specific information in the discussion. It does not clarify, provide resources, or push the discussion further.

Not responding to the discussion or being minimally present.

For this category, the instructor must be present and active in the discussion.