I used discussions and the adaptive release tools. I would have weekly discussion posts. They would require knowledge of the content from the previous week. Often I would give a choice of topics and try to make at least one of them have some element of fun (i.e. how would baseball differ on the moon? What rules and/or equipment changes would have to be made?). The discussions could also be based on relevant recent news stories or articles.
The students were split into groups and using adaptive release I could ensure that they could only see their own groups chat (if I wished for them to not take ideas from other groups). I could also use the adaptive release feature to have the student say they had done the relevant reading before they were able to access the discussion area (I could also have put a quiz that they had to pass before access was allowed).
This can serve any number of students (I have done as small as 4 and as large as 350), but for larger classes, you need TA’s.
Generally, I just wished to get the undergraduate students thinking about the content and applying it. I also wish to have the students practising professional communication as this is an essential skill. For the faculty development course, goals were to engage participants with topics to inspire deep learning, and evidence-based practice, while modelling best practices for online education.
Undergraduate Course
- Explain the concepts learned in class and apply them to relevant scenarios
- Demonstrate professional communication with their classmates
Faculty Development Course
- Critically evaluate and adopt educational concepts, practices, issues, and strategies to guide practice in Online Education (OLE) such as interaction, collaboration, course design, and managing different abilities
- Having exemplar posts (for different topics than those being covered) and clear guidelines. This includes making it clear that they must respond to each other in a manner that promotes discussion.
- Giving prompt feedback after the first week, so students know what is expected.
- Providing a detailed rubric along with an exemplar and Forum Posting Guidelines
- This works much better with smaller classes. It is easy to read through the posts and engage with the students.
- Often students would wait until near the due date before posting, which would, unfortunately, limit the time to reply.
- For large classes, it was very difficult to engage with everyone and give feedback. TA’s can help, but then you have to work to ensure consistency.
I think having two separate due dates, one for the initial response and one for replies might help add more engagement. The only concern I have is that some students were able to reply and post together quite wonderfully, so I would not want to discourage that.
Mark Lubrick – Learning Specialist in the Office of Open Learning
mlubrick@uwindsor.ca