I have a discussion assignment in my course in which students must discuss an ethical dilemma and come to a consensus on how they would handle it. One of the strategies that we use, noted in this article, was that these types of discussions should utilize real-world scenarios. This allows students to begin to synthesize what they are learning into a safe environment, before they must put it to real use.
I found that there was not enough conversation that occurred in this semester for this assignment to be really impactful for the students. I think that the wording of some of the scenarios was not clear enough and there was not enough time for students to work their way through the coursework required to really delve into the topic. For this reason, I extended the due date by a week. I will also be assigning some pre-work, as noted in the above article, to hopefully jump start the discussion.