Engaging online dialogue: The pedagogy of annotation-enhanced discussion forums

Our research aims to improve online discussion forums and their associated pedagogy. We describe a pedagogical approach emphasizing the importance of moderating and a software add-on to the Moodle discussion forum called Marginalia designed to implement our preferred pedagogy. We focus on annotation, aiding the retrieval of archived material, making it easy for teachers to provide feedback, helping participants build upon each other’s ideas, and encouraging participants to write “weaving” messages that connect ideas and summarize the discourse. Preliminary studies of nine online classes (n = 156) found a number of uses of the software, some of them unexpected.