Why Online Students Need to Debate
The word “debate” can be perceived in a negative fashion. Arguing with each other can be an unpleasant experience if emotions are involved and rational thinking is tossed to the wind. Think of how many unnecessary fights have started on Facebook for just about every topic. What’s fascinating is that these interactions were unprompted, causing thousands of people to converse online yet it can be a struggle to foster online student engagement in a typical asynchronous online discussion. Educators and instructional designers can marry the two concepts to make an effective learning experience. I’m talking about the debate-based approach.
The debate-based approach is an instructional design theme structured to make students choose a side on an issue pertaining to the appropriate subject matter. The outcome to the debate-based approach is to provide opportunities for the development and justification of arguments and counterarguments, the identification of inconsistencies in reasoning, the reevaluation of initial arguments, and the resolution of differences between perspectives (Darabi et al., 2011; Jonassen, 1997). The debated-based approach’s main benefit is to increase critical thinking skills by creating logical arguments for or against an issue. As a result of preparing for the debate, research has shown that students research and explore relevant ideas, organize and make sense of facts, make judgments about ideas or hypotheses, and testing ideas or hypotheses (Darabi et al., 2011; Kanuka et al., 2007; Richardson & Ice, 2010).
As mentioned before, the topics must be relevant in the field relating to the course content. For instance, here are a few examples of subjects and their related debatable topics:
Information Technology
There will be more remote jobs than typical office jobs in 10 years
AI will permanently change our social behaviors
Organizational Leadership
Leadership styles should change based on the generation
Universities should require that all students pass a leadership class before graduation
Science
The government should fine people who don’t recycle
Math
Mathematics should not be a curriculum requirement for higher education
Instructional designers and educators can set up these online discussion boards with a prompt asking students to select a side. However, students can also be assigned via a cohort modeling tool to manually assign them to a side of the issue. This all depends upon the topic and the educator’s preference for building a robust online discussion.
One recognized limitation is the emotional involvement towards one side of the issue. It’s been documented that students who gravitate towards an issue because of a social response will be less likely to rely on facts and will use opinions to debate (Darabi et al., 2011). To reduce this risk, students can be assigned to the non-favored side of the argument, which this arguably could raise critical thinking skills even more because the other perspective has to be explored. Another reduction technique is to focus the debate around policy. According to Dr. Leek (2016), Director of Academic Innovation and Distance Education at Bunker Hill Community College, “Policy questions challenge students to apply their understanding of facts and values to agents of action - and this can work to depersonalize and focus debates on substantive issues” (p. na). This form of policy debate creates new ways for students to think on topics instead of seeing them as right or wrong.
While productive debating can be difficult to establish, remember that Bloom’s Taxonomy mentioned debating in the analysis category of the learning process. Once a student has reached this analysis point, they are expected to be able to break material into constituent parts, determine how the parts relate to one another, and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). With such a deep understanding of the material, utilizing the debate-based approach is an effective strategy to establish presence and participation in asynchronous online discussions.
References:
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives: Complete edition, New York: Longman.
Darabi, A., Liang, X., Suryavanshi, R., & Yurekli, H. (2013). Effectiveness of online discussion strategies: A metaanalysis. American Journal of Distance Education, 27(4), 228-241.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2013.837651
Jonassen, D. H. (1997). Instructional design models for well-structured and ill-structured problem- outcomes. Educational Technology Research and Development, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02299613
Leek, D. R. (2016). Policy debate pedagogy: A complementary strategy for civic and political engagement through service-learning. Communication Education 65(4), 397-408.
Schindler, L. & Burkholder, G. (2014) Instructional design and facilitation approaches that promote critical thinking in asynchronous online discussions: A review of the literature.
