Increasing Student Engagement online

Here's a quick tip I found in the Online Classroom:

"Threaded discussion summaries

To help create shared learning experiences, Beezley has students take turns summarizing the threaded discussions. This helps create a common understanding, serves as a means of assessing students’ understanding of the content, and gives the chance to actively engage with the course content.

Rather than posting these summaries to the discussion board, Beezley has students post them to a course wiki or to Google Docs. This increases the accessibility of the summaries, which can be important for future reference and to enable all the students to edit them in case the student who did the original summary overlooked or misinterpreted key concepts.

Beezley recommends discussing the summary (synchronously or asynchronously) with the students to assess its accuracy and prevent incorrect information from becoming ingrained in students’ minds. “Whenever possible, have students interact with the summary so that they are looking at it critically,” Beezley says."

 I like the ideas of  not simply posting to the discussion board.  A couple of years ago I completed a U of Manitoba course called "Emerging Technologies".  In it, instructor George Seimans would frequently post a vodcast summarizing trends indicated in discussions, and give us tips on what else to consider.  This simple activity increased my sense of engagement.