About Divided Discussion Topics#

Tags: educator concept

This section provides information about setting up discussions that are divided by learner groups (cohorts) within your course.

For overview information about discussions in a course, see About Course Discussions.

For more information about creating differentiated course content for learners in different groups (cohorts), see Offering Different Content to Different Learner Groups.

What Are Divided Discussions?#

With divided discussions, discussion topics are visible to all learners, but the posts, responses, and comments within these topics are divided so that learners participate in the discussion only with other members of the same group (cohort).

Discussion topics that are not divided are unified, meaning that all learners in the course can see and respond to posts, responses, and comments from any other learner in the course.

Best Practices for Divided Discussions#

If you divide discussions, a good practice is to use a naming convention for discussion topics, so that learners clearly understand the audience for a discussion topic before they add posts to that topic. For information about naming conventions, see Apply Naming Conventions to Discussion Topics.

You can also appoint learners as Community TAs or Group Commmunity TAs to help you to moderate course discussions. You might use Group Community TAs if the content of discussion topics by one group (cohort) should not be shared with another group. Group Community TAs are themselves members of learner groups (cohorts) that you use in your course. As discussion moderators, they can only see and respond to posts by other members of their own group (cohort). For information, see Assigning Discussion Moderation Roles.

For more information about managing discussions, see Managing Divided Discussion Topics and Running Course Discussions.

Note

Another method of providing different discussion experiences for learners in different groups in your course is to use the access settings of discussion components. For example, you can add multiple discussion components and use each component’s access settings to restrict access to each discussion component to a specific content group. You can then assign these content groups to learner groups (cohorts). For more information, see Setting Up Divided Discussions.