Successful online discussions can build community, keep students on time with their coursework, help students when they have trouble with material, and encourage analysis and synthesis, not just knowledge-telling. They are essential to making an online class into more than a correspondence course. Yet it can seem as though our colleagues in English and history are the ones with all the good discussion ideas, while those of us in math and science are limited to the relatively dull task of asking students to post a homework problem. Recently,