so the discussion boards are a very important part of the course it's a way for you to interact with each other to help teach yourself and others the material and to interact with me and learn things from me get clarifications from me and and also helped me learn as well so the discussion boards are something that I really enjoy and what I've decided to do this semester is to make them much more student-led than they've been in the past in the past I've largely led the discussion boards but I've found that I'm not really able to respond or interact with as many of the comments on the discussion board as I would like to optimally so this semester what I'm doing is having students essentially act as the leads or the curators for the discussion I'll still participate but I want you all to get the opportunity and the experience of leading a discussion helping to answer questions and curating different directions in a discussion board I think it's good practice for you and I think it'll enable me to better interact with what's going on on the discussion board by freeing up my time to be able to really focus on posting responses I have a full-time job outside of this teaching engagement and there's also a lot of work behind the scenes during the semester to keep the course running and that all really limits the amount of time that I can spend actually on the discussion board so I want to make sure that you feel you're getting really good feedback and having a really engage time in the discussion board and and as such I don't want that to have to rely on on me being available to make sure that that's going on so I'm empowering you all to really ensure that we have an active and vigorous discussion this semester so what the way this is going to work because of the number of students we have about 20 students in the class is that I'm going to divide everyone up each week into two separate groups you'll be randomly assigned to a group so it'll rotate around and that'll give you the chance to engage with different people it'll make sure that your discussion pod does not stagnate at any point in the past I've taught two sections this class simultaneously and it's been really interesting to see how each section operates as a really independent organism the discussion boards end up looking very different and by moving you all around from week to week I think it'll encourage a variety of different styles and and and different directions in the discussion to emerge and you'll still get to know each other because you'll probably be together for you know an average about half of the discussions since it's random so I'll divide you up into two groups of ten into two different discussion boards and in these two discussion boards that's where you'll spend most of the week chatting with your classmates and interacting with me and each week there will be a lead for each of the discussion boards everyone in the class participates in one of the two discussion boards and what I'll do is post the name of the participants in each of these sub boards on the front page of that board like I mentioned each board has a lead and that name will will go out in advance so you know on a schedule when you're leading the discussion each week in these boards should really be related to the material in the class so the things that are in the lecture video are the things that are in the book you can ask questions about the material if there's something you don't quite understand if there was something you found interesting I encourage you to bring information from outside of the class into the discussion can be personal information or perhaps new scientific findings or things that are going on outside of the class that are relevant to that week's topic please do bring it in it really makes it very stimulating and and you all will be grading each other's so the participants each week will grade the lead of that week and the lead will grade the participants each week and over time your discussion and participation score will be cumulatively based on these grades that you receive for these two roles in the class so each week towards the end of the week the curators are leads of each of these weekly discussion boards so the two people assigned to lead these discussion boards in a particular week at the end of the week they'll sum up the discussion and their board and then post it on a third board that'll be higher level and which everyone in the entire class can look at so not just the two subgroups but actually all twenty students and it's expected that you'll look at this and it should be interesting to see the the different summaries of what the two groups talked about at that point you can have some discussion about the summaries or other topics that you want to bring up in the the whole class forum and in general you know most of the discussion should take place the week in which it's most relevant but it's fine you know for things to continue into the the following week especially you know on this whole class board where the summaries make you up some questions for me or questions from you or other points you want to add the summary should be fewer than 500 words and it should be posted on Tuesday this as the syllabus says the class resets every Wednesday and goes goes on to the next week's material everyone in the class should be familiar with what's on the whole class discussion board and like I mentioned all the students can participate in comment in addition there may be some weeks where there will be a topical discussion a particular topic that I thought the whole class would find interesting and the intention is for everyone to be engaged with that special topic and to post on it and have discussions on it not every week will have this but some weeks will and if you're interested in the grading process there's a lot of detail in the syllabus about this I'm not going to go into it here except to say that the course engagement score is is the the total grade for course engagement is worth quite a bit of your total grade in the class and a lot of that grade is determined through the peer grading process so the discussion board is really important you really should participate as much as possible and it should not be quantity of participation it's really the quality that matters and there are some parameters in the syllabus to help the participants grade the and the leads grade the participants so I encourage you to look through them I don't want to go through them in this video because they're already written out and I think they're fairly straightforward but this is how the discussion boards are gonna work I think it'll really help you get much more timely feedback and much more voluminous feedback it'll help me really focus on what to respond to and be able to spend my time interacting with your ideas instead of sort of keeping track of your performance on the boards and I think overall it's a win-win for everyone so I'm really excited to see how this works and and and and thank you for doing the experiment with me if you have any questions about this please post them in the discussion board for general syllabus or general class questions that you might have thanks