I participated in the first cohort of the ID2ID program, co-sponsored by the EDUCAUSE Learning Intitiative (ELI) and Penn State. I was teamed up with my "buddy" Laura March (Instructional Designer - UNC-Chapel Hill) during the months long and extremely valuable professional development opportunity. We decided to focus on lackluster online student discussions for our capstone project. Online discussions are often treated as perfunctory, and fall short of providing students meaningful interactions.

One of the hardest aspects in making the Online Discussions Doctor was identifying ailments that aren't contained within the discussion itself but nonetheless affect their success. For instance, faculty should consider how well they have established goodwill and trust between students at the start of a course. They should also reflect on how the course discussions help students progress toward learning outcomes, and whether students understand this purpose. These are the types of questions we as instructional designers ask faculty during workshops and consultations.

Do students feel connected with each other, and safe enough to really speak their minds?

Do students understand how their contributions to a discussion helps prepare them for major course assignments?

The riddle of designing and facilitating engaging and useful online discussions that been on my mind for years. It's one of the major complaints I hear from faculty.

How can online discussions capture the excitement and passion of the classroom?

I have curated a library of resources over the years covering various subjects. I often return to these collections, and I share them with faculty when I think they'd benefit from a quick read. For online discussions, I combed over my collection and defined common themes from articles written by designers and researchers. I then created a draft of the Online Discussion Doctor. Working with Laura was fantastic. She took my materials and reorganized them into a very appealing infographic that you see above.

Laura was interviewed about the ID2ID program by the Inside Higher Ed publication in an article entitled Peer Mentoring for Instructional Designers Pays Off. The article links to our infographic. Laura and I received a lot of positive feedback. Many instructional designers asked to share the Online Discussion Doctor with their faculty, including colleagues at the University of Washington-Bothell, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Townson University.

Here is a PDF book of the Online Discussion Doctor if you'd like to explore further.