Facilitating Different Student Interactions with a New Online Conversational Platform

Traditionally, academic discussion tools support a single interaction mode: rapid conversation, multiparagraph reading reactions, brainstorming, and so on. While each mode has its place, faculty typically select a single tool for their entire course and are often dissatisfied when it does not fully meet their needs. NYU is developing a platform that allows instructors to choose different modes of student interaction they want to encourage, assignment by assignment. This session will provide an overview of the project and a demo of the tool, which will eventually be released as open-source software.

Outcomes: Identify the types of student engagement that faculty typically want to facilitate in their online course sites * Understand the limitations inherent to many of the single-mode conversational tools currently available * Learn about NYU's development of a new conversation platform that provides faculty with multiple modes of student interaction