What Role Should the Teaching Team Play within the Asynchronous Discussion?
We have suggested that teachers should not lecture within the confines of asynchronous discussion. Rather, we urge the teaching team to regularly communicate about the discussions occurring within an online bulletin board. Such discussions will serve as useful information for further teacher planning, as we argued earlier. But, such discussions also can help teachers better plan the type of educational interventions that students need within a discussion. We suggest that teachers ask lots of questions within the online discussion. In terms of raising questions, we think teachers can best serve students by asking questions that will promote additional thinking about interdisciplinary units. Christiansen (1991), for example, suggests prediction questions. Such questions are very consistent with the type of flow to the asynchronous discussion that we define earlier. A teacher could help scaffold continued discussion by asking students to predict additional learning issues (what they want
