Online Discussions

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The goal of a creating the citizen scholar in higher education deeply intersects with the ways that students interact in online discussions. Online instructors hope to engage students in deliberative discussion (Parker & Hess, 2001) to facilitate the core elements of critical analysis and civility in discourse. Discussions are intended to help students negotiate contradictions and competing values by setting challenging views alongside students’ current perceptions of the matter (Bridges, 1979), creating a new dialectic in the course of action. However, as discussion shifts to online formats, digital misinformation is becoming widespread and threatens critical and civil communication among people (DelVicario et al., 2016; Howell, 2013). Just as rumors and homogenous ways of thinking were spread virally through social media postings (Del Vicario et al., 2016), individuals in academic online discussions may extend their predisposed preferences and polarizing positions by reinforcing unexamined biases (Kahneman, 2011) within their postings. Consequently, these unconscious biases threaten civil discourse. Pedagogical treatments for online discussion related to improving misinformation bias may have value for intergroup dialogue and for online learning. Online discussions grounded in interventions that help students to tap into their slower, more intentional System 2 thinking may promote inter-subjectivity, reasoned dialogue and metacognition by assisting students to reflect upon and question their own and others’ ideologically positioned beliefs with habits of critical analysis, intellectual humility, reflection and civility discourse.

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