Discus Uses
Course information and announcements
Create class lists (biographies, photos)
Respond to common questions
Group assignments and result sharing
Student discussion of assigned reading
Student-created homework keys
Online conferences and collaborations
Notes:
Discus allows students to find key information quickly and at anytime (I find information faster through Discus than on my desk). It’s easy to make course announcements, which are then automatically emailed to students.
Faculty can post classlists or students can post self-introductions to get to know each other better.
All students can benefit from your answer to a good question. In fact, I require students who ask questions in person to post their question so that I can answer it for the class, thereby saving me time from answering repetitive questions.
Students can share or pool results on group assignments.
Humanities faculty require a post on assigned reading before class so that they can decide how to run the class discussion.
I assign each homework problem to a student and require that the student post the solution as well as respond to all questions about it. Students take more ownership of course material and save me time.
I think that Discus would be an ideal vehicle to use for running online conferences (CONFCHEM) and cross-institutional student collaborations.
Discus is so easy and powerful that it has totally replaced the creation of course-specific websites by faculty at Hope College.