Last year, for my onsite class, I used Moodle’s glossary function to have students create an annotated art collection. Although I used it occasionally in lecture, the outcomes for its use were not very clear — we were mostly just experimenting with the technology. I liked what students found to post, though, and what they said about their items.
For some time in my Moodle discussion forums, I’ve been using a two-step system. Each week has its own forum in the simple format. I post a visual or video prompt, asking a very open question such as “how does this connect to our reading this week?” They are required to make their first post by Wednesday midnight. I come in on Thursday, summarize the discussion, and take it to the next level through quoting them and asking questions designed to deepen the discussion. They have till Sunday night to respond.
A couple of weeks ago, I explained what I do in an Elluminate session for our Program for Online Teaching. The visuals aren’t the point here, but an excerpt from the session should provide an idea of what I’m doing:
As I mention, students are assessed on their discussion performance twice during the semester, at the half-way point and at the end, each for 10% of the grade. They do a self-assessment based on the rubric (for example), and I assign points to that. This semester, on both the self-assessments and the end-of-semester class evaluation, a few students were saying what’s become a typical discussion complaint. They felt that the students who got there before them had already “said everything” so they didn’t have much to say.
Now remember, I’ve designed the prompts to be so open that having someone else say what you were going to say shouldn’t even be possible. And, of course, a number of students didn’t return each week for the analytical part of the discussion. And yet, they felt this way.
My own dissatisfaction with discussion has been different; it isn’t about management or what they’ve said. I not only enjoyed their posts, but my bi-weekly summarizing and guidance system was highly efficient. Their self-assessments were usually dead-on, and they appreciated the opportunity to do them.
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| Photo credit: exzombie at Flickr |
My problem was that discussion seemed text-heavy and overly directed. We call it discussion, but of course everyone is typing. A number of students were writing when writing didn’t seem to be their thing. Some students did post images, which I encouraged, and some linked to other kinds of resources. Sometimes discussions got very lively, with (civil) disagreements and connections to modern events. But these things seemed to happen by chance rather than as part of my instructional design. Discussion just wasn’t broad enough, visual enough, connective enough, exciting enough, for me. There wasn’t enough sense of students discovering things on their own, constructing something. I wanted something constructivist, like my art gallery glossary had been, but directed in a way that enabled me to guide effectively in alignment with the course goals.
Plus, I’ve been sensitive for awhile that, although my assignments are very open and let students work on things in different ways, I do not have alternatives built in. In other words, you can’t either take the quiz or do a project. I have felt unable to individualize assignments and grading this way because I have so many students.
Today a possible redesign occurred to me. 
I’d keep all my prompts (I do like them, after all), but the assignment would be different. Instead of commenting textually, students will have options. They can post an image, audio or video clip, and just briefly explain how it’s connected to the original prompt, or add their own connection to someone else’s item. In other words, we’d be collecting evidence related to that week’s topic (this is possible because my online West and US classes focus on the modern era, so there’s lots of stuff available). Students who like text could post excerpts from historical documents instead of something aural or visual.
Then, for the second part of the week, they’d need to select several of the pieces of evidence that have been posted, and construct some kind of theme or thesis tying them together, in their own way, to say something about the era. This is the historical skill I spend all semester cultivating anyway, gradually getting them to construct and prove historical theses, in a way that allows for lots of mistakes and re-doing. And as I’m doing now, I can guide more specifically early on in the class, and more loosely later on.
This new design would create several benefits:
- More work for them, less for me — this is one of my mantras, because their learning should result from their own practice of skills and reflection on material (as Stephen Downes has noted, that’s their job).
- Themes would be introduced earlier — the gradual approach I’ve been using of starting with facts, then moving slowly into interpretation and themes, did not allow enough thesis practice — this will.
- Options and choices — students who are visual can post images and videos, aural folks can post audio files, text learners can post text, so more learning styles are reached and a wider variety of evidence is collected.
- Tech-savviness would be encouraged — students often either have very few web skills or don’t use them much for learning, so this might help them practice.
So that leaves me a few things to do:
- Change the instructions for each forum.
- Create tutorials on how to add images, audio and video to the forums.
- Update the FAQ to point to these tutorials.
Overall, this should be a good change. I want to focus more anyway on designing for openness inside a Course Management System, and I think this will be a good start. The wonderful resources on the web can be searched, posted and repurposed, even though the class is offered in a CMS. And that’s worth doing for all sorts of reasons….
I really like that idea Lisa: it intrigues me that in one space, you will see different themes drawing on a set of objects, overlapping and showing how evidence is interpreted differently.
Will they be allowed to introduce new objects at the point they are docuemnting their theme?
Thanks Lisa for this sharing. I could now understand your concern about the discussion issue, their lack of skills in the Moodle Forum, and their lack of in-depth analysis and critical thinking in their learning.
So there is a need of new design to approach the problem.
I like your approach, in that you intend to empower them to put more efforts into learning and reflect more regularly in order to improve their learning.
Designing for openness sounds good. What about your students’ readiness of openness?
My first few encounters with fellow colleagues (in staff development courses) and students “on-line” were not easy. I would say most people were faily “closed” – not much interaction or openness, especially if people don’t see the needs.
Sometimes, it may be “good” to learn from such “mistakes”. Learning styles DO exist.
As some people are introverts, how would you cater for their needs in such environment.
You might also have found such scenarios from CCK08, where one could find no comments for nearly all posts, or some are just lurkers….without much sign of openness.
So, that would be interesting to learn how to design and apply “openness” in practice.
John
I have been thinking about these same issues, Lisa, in both onsite and online settings. And I think the mixing of options is a good tool. In my hybrid class this semester, I found that when students were asked to post and comment upon images, videos, or sound that they constructed very interesting posts. I still provide a bit more structure than you do (mostly because I do not think I have your gift for the truly open question–but I am working on it!)–and one particular structure I have been having some success with is the application question:
“Find an image, video, our sound clip on the web and apply Jack Solomon’s ideas about competitive elitism in America to what you find: What would Solomon say about the example you have found. Make sure you wrap up your post with some evaluation: do you agree with what you have posited as Solomon’s analysis or not?”
Of course, this can be opened up in lots of ways, but the idea of finding something out there and then applying and evaluating something the student has read has been working for me…
@Jim Thanks so much for posting an example of a question you use — I like the way you have them tie specifically to a concept. In my structure, this would work in the second part of the week.
The (slight) difference between our initial approaches I also find interesting. I have been writing the honors curriculum for History under the new rules, and have been frustrated by the demand to tie course “content” (in our case, usually a chronological list of items) more closely to the “student performance objectives” (which I want to be more skills-based). I would like instructors to be able to choose, even on the spur of the moment, which content they want to use to achieve those objectives. Kind of like my open-ended questions applied to curriculum.
@Frances That is one of those things I’ll leave open the first time I do it, to see what happens. In terms of method, if they bring in just one additional item to prove their point, that would work great, but I want to encourage them to bring the good stuff in up front, then work with what’s there, creating a pattern. I know some students will bring in more during the second part of the discussion, regardless of any instruction, so I’ll leave it open.
@John Although articles have said otherwise, I have not found that lack of easy sociability in a real-world environment relates to online behavior. I think most students who are shy to post online are unsure about what they say. Here, perhaps, those students will find it more comfortable to post an actual item on which they can base their comments. What I want is for them to feel OK about exploring ideas with others.
Sounds like what you want is VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com).
Hi, Paul. The only reason I wouldn’t want to go for Voicethread is that I really need them to write in the forum (rather than speak). This is for two reasons, the most important being that it is the main place, other than the essays on tests, where they do write, since I do not assign major papers. The second reason is that I have 200 students per semester, and read much faster than I could listen to all the responses!