Facilitating critical discourse through "meaningful disagreement" online.

This paper is concerned with identifying ways of facilitating "meaningful disagreement" amongst students in interprofessional online discussion forums. It builds on previous research that identified a trend toward polite agreement and only limited evidence of disagreement in this setting. Given the suggestion that disagreement indicates a deeper level of engagement in group discussion and therefore leads to deeper learning, our aim was to critique the pedagogical approach adopted by analyzing whether we were promoting a particular interprofessional discourse amongst students that favored agreement and therefore limited potential learning. Agreement in this context has been conceptualized as a form of online interprofessional "netiquette" existing amongst participants. Findings suggest that creating an online context for critical discourse is challenging; however, the careful construction of learning outcomes, trigger material/resources and learning activities, as well as attention to students' stage of study and life experience, can provoke the desired effects.