• How do I want students to prepare: read case study? team exercise? watch documentary? reflect on questions?
• What questions will spark or guide discussions? What will encourage deeper analysis?
• Will discussion be open to entire class, discussion in pairs, small groups, or some combination?
• What if a student isn't participating, or is dominating?
• How allocate and manage what time I have?
• Deal with digressions or unanticipated shifts in topics?
• How correct inaccuracies or misconception without stifling?
• How synthesize ideas at end (students or me)?

For more ideas, check out this guide from Carnegie Mellon University.

These thoughts are from the Connect For Education site.

1. Blog format - students can post multiple topics, displayed in a blog-like format.
2. General use - general forum in which students can post topics and replies.
3. Single discussion - students respond to a single question or topic. Topic determined by the professor.
4. Each posts one - each student creates one new discussion topic; they may respond to other students' topics and comments.
5. Q and A - Professor posts a question, students reply with their answers. Students can only see their classmates' responses after they have responded to the posts themselves.

For more on setting up discussions in Populi, check out the Knowledge Base here.

• Exploratory - probe facts and basic knowledge
• Challenge - interrogate assumptions, conclusions, or interpretations
• Relational - ask for comparisons of themes, ideas, or issues
• Diagnostic - probe motives or causes
• Action - call for a conclusion or action
• Cause-and-effect - ask for causal relationships between ideas, actions, or events
• Extension - expand the discussion
• Hypothetical - pose a change in the facts or issues
• Priority - seek to identify the most important issue(s)
• Summary - elicit synthesis.

More ideas can be found at this Carnegie Mellon site.

It is important to leave time at the end of the discussion to synthesize the central issues covered, key questions raised, etc. There are a number of ways to synthesize. You could, for example, tell students that one of them (they won’t know who in advance) will be asked at the end of every discussion to identify the major issues, concerns and conclusions generated during discussion. You could also ask students individually to write down what they believe was the most important point, the overall conclusion, and/or a question the discussion raised in their mind (these can be collected and serve as the basis of a follow-up lecture or discussion.) You might also provide students with a set of 2 or 3 “take-home” points synthesizing what you thought were the key issues raised in discussion.  Synthesizing the discussion is a critical step for linking the discussion to the original learning objectives and demonstrating progress towards meeting those objectives.