As an LSA instructor you have access to additional discussion tools outside of Canvas discussions. Our LSA specific discussion tools, Harmonize and YellowDig, give you increased opportunities to innovate with online discussions. In this tip, you’ll take an in depth look at Harmonize, an online discussion platform with a user interface that supports increased teacher and peer engagement with student created content.

Why Instructors Choose Harmonize

Instructors who have opted to use Harmonize over more traditional discussion board platforms, found that Harmonize increased engagement with student produced content. Student responses in Harmonize are displayed by default as cards on a pinboard with the number of student and teacher comments on each post clearly visible at a glance. This highly visual view makes it easy for students to scan all posts, and helps avoid the common issue in threaded discussions where students only interact with the most recent posts positioned at the top of the discussion thread.
 

Instructors have also found that displaying posts in a pinboard style increases student engagement in online discussions. For each assignment,  you can require students to post a cover photo that will appear on their card. This photo can serve as a hook to entice potential readers. If an image is not required, the default image for students’ posts is their profile image. This visual reminder of who students are interacting with when they read a post, helps foster peer to peer connections. The profile image may also help students identify posts by authors they have engaged with previously. 

Another primary reason instructors choose Harmonize is the ease of grading discussion board participation. One of the most useful grading features this tool offers is called Milestones. With Milestones, an instructor can set multiple due dates worth a customized number of points and have the system automatically mark the task complete or incomplete at a specified date/time. For example, Milestones make it possible for instructors to require all students to post by Wednesday and reply to two peers by Sunday without spending time checking submissions manually.
 

Designing Collaborative Learning Experiences with Harmonize

While discussion board tools are primarily used to prepare students for in-person discussions, they are not limited to this one use case. Below are just some of the ways LSA instructors have leveraged Harmonize to engage students in collaborative learning outside of the traditional discussion board assignment. 

Private Journals

One innovative use case of Harmonize is private student reflection journals. In an American Culture course, students reflect on course readings in an assignment called the “Harmonize Reading Notebook." For this assignment, the instructor interacts with student entries while keeping student reflections hidden from the rest of the class. Harmonize makes this possible, allowing instructors to set up discussions to be viewable only between the student and the instructor. Using Harmonize for this assignment made it easy for the instructor to view and interact privately with all of their students’ journals in one place. It also gave students an easy way to revisit their previous journal posts, as all of their entries were within the same discussion board assignment. If you would like to learn more about using journals in Harmonize, visit our tip on Putting Metacognition Into Practice Using Journals in Harmonize. 

Student Portfolios

Harmonize can also be used to house and manage viewing of student curated portfolios. Some instructors have moved away from using websites to house a student portfolio in favor of using Harmonize. The multimedia capabilities of Harmonize and the full integration with Canvas make it easy for instructors to access a range of student portfolio entries without ever leaving Canvas. Using a fully integrated tool within Canvas also gives instructors the advantage of automatically  tracking all submissions to ensure all portfolio components are submitted by the deadline.

Peer Review 

Harmonize is a powerful tool for overcoming the limitations of in-person classroom environments. In a film analysis course, where students create video essays to analyze director choices in films, providing peer feedback on these multimedia rich projects can be challenging to achieve. The time required for each student to present their video and for the class to process and provide feedback is hard to manage during a live class session. Moving this process to Harmonize makes viewing student work and providing feedback much more manageable and enjoyable. The video annotation tool in Harmonize allows students to mark up selected video frames and drop callouts to leave comments, giving the author highly contextualized and meaningful feedback on their work. The same annotation features are also available to mark up images posted in Harmonize. 

Recorded Discussions

In language courses, one of the most popular Harmonize features is the built in video recorder. Students in a French language class create and share videos of themselves responding in French to discussion prompts. The videos are recorded within the Harmonize platform and are posted in the same way as text-based responses. Students require no additional training to be able to use the video recording tool in Harmonize. Once posted, students can annotate their peers’ videos and provide replies using text or video. Video-based discussion activities give students additional opportunities to leverage the classroom community and strengthen their language skills. 
 

Text Annotations

Harmonize also has a PDF Annotation assignment option. This assignment option allows the instructor to upload a PDF within Harmonize for students to annotate. Students can highlight text or drop pins anywhere in the document to add comments. Students can reply to one another's annotations, easily navigate to new annotations or unread replies, and tag specific classmates in their comment or reply. This is a great tool if you only plan to use annotation assignments at key points during the term. If annotation assignments are integral to your course, a dedicated annotation tool such as Perusall or Hypothesis is likely a better fit. 

If you would like to use Harmonize in your course, please schedule a consultation with the LSA Learning and Teaching Consultants. We would be happy to help you set up a collaborative assignment using Harmonize.