Category: Discussion

Why discussion sucks (and what to do about it)

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Students at colleges around the country are told to participate, but why?

Since the dawn of online classes, the goal of college professors has been to somehow duplicate the excitement of classroom discussion. With the advent of the Read-Write Web (Web 2.0) fifteen years ago, the threaded discussion forum became popular, and immediately the pattern was set.

We do what we’ve been told to do: create a great prompt, not a yes-no question or something too shallow. We want everyone to respond to it, reinforcing readings or other learning in the class. Then, because we want student-student interaction, each student is required to reply to at least two of their colleagues. The prompt-post-reply model has held.

Never mind that this is not the way discussion happens in a classroom. There may be a prompt thrown out by the professor, but only a few students answer, and only if their answers can be different. We might set up small groups to get students to talk, but if we’re experienced we know better than to just say “discuss”. And we usually intervene to advance the discussion or take it in another direction.

Never mind that we haven’t bothered to ask why we’re doing online discussion at all. It’s discussion. You’re supposed to do it. Or you have to do something. Many colleges require “student to student interaction” for all online classes. But no one explains why. It’s just assumed to be a Good Thing.

And yet the result is often appalling.

The problem

Most online discussions are absolutely worthless to read (from an instructor perspective) and worthless to do (from a student perspective). The eager students answer the questions first and fully. The others trail along just to finish and get the points. Every student knows the drill: post once, reply twice. Then leave as quickly as you can and do not return.

If the prompt is a question, however intricate, or a specific task (“post your thesis”), then once their first post is done, the student’s task has been completed. The only reason to reply to anyone else’s post is because the prof told you to. That’s not interaction. It’s mandatory politeness, like saying “how are you?” when you don’t really care.

“I agree, James,” they write, “I also think that slavery was bad.” Nothing really happening there mentally, I don’t think. And James likely won’t return to see the reply anyway. Why should he?

A twist on traditional discussion

I went as far as I could with the method, in an effort to increase participation. I achieved discussion somewhat successfully with my two-step approach. This involved starting with a prompt that did not require previous knowledge, and set up some kind of moral judgement to get people engaged. Questions like “was it right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima?” or “did the Confederacy have a point about states rights?” or “was slavery essential to the growth of the United States?” got students started.

After they had all emoted about the topic for the first half of the week, I posted “Take discussion from here”. I used big font and a color for my post, and it summarized what they’d said so far, naming names of students who had made good points. Then I asked different questions that seemed to follow from what they’d said, questions that relied on their reading and used reason (rather than emotion) to deal with the main issues. Their second post was a reply to mine and/or to each other, to conclude that week.

It worked, in a way. But many students, having given ill-informed opinions to start, didn’t bother to return for the real work in the second half.

Designing for necessity

Sometimes, there’s simply no need for conversation. You read (or look, or listen), you do the work, and you’re done. Discussion should only take place when it is necessary, whether in the classroom or online. There are two things that can make discussion necessary:

  1. If talking together is essential to work something out or to complete a task.
  2. If the product of the conversation is going to be used, applied, or figured out.

So we could design for necessity. Let’s say I’m teaching design, and I demand on the discussion board that each student design and post a different carnival ride. Once they have posted, they seem to have finished the task. There could be no reason to ask them to comment on two other students’ designs. But if the next task is to write a short paper contrasting three designs (yours and those of two other students), then the comments become preparatory for creating something.

Or we could do role play. The class is to be considered a committee-as-a-whole for determining which route across campus would be best for the architects to create as a footpath. What information should be gathered, and how? Once results have come in, how will the data inform the decision? The deadline is Thursday, because the architects need to break ground.

Or let’s take my two-step discussion technique, where I start with something ill-informed and emotional, and then we get informed in the second step. I could have made it better by making sure that the discussion was used somehow, through a formal assignment such as a paper or quiz. The conclusions we developed could have been summarized and used to inform individual work.

The rules

So my new rules for discussion would be:

  1. ensure that conversation is inherently necessary to the task or subject
  2. design so that each student would naturally post something different
  3. create something that applies or uses the results of the discussion

Otherwise, I’d say there’s no point.

Discuss.

Perusing pictures

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I almost forgot, in all the madness, that I am trying an experiment in my History of Technology class. I detailed the idea in my post from July. But I hadn’t implemented it till this semester.

First a review: in every class I teach online, instead of a traditional discussion board, I assign a set of primary source documents. I put these in Perusall (using the LTI in Canvas), uploaded as a pdf. Students then can select parts of the text, and annotate it. They can respond to each others annotations, and add images or video to help each other read the material.

This semester I’ve tried it with images. I put together two sets of images in Microsoft Word, one for images from the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry (for the Middle Ages), and one for a collection of postcards from the early 20th century imagining the world in 2000 (for the turn of the 20th century). I then saved each collection as a pdf, and uploading them into Perusall.

I’ve just been reviewing the latter. The History of Technology class is always difficult to get talking. The class attracts a wonderful assortment of students, particularly those in computer science or who already work in information technology. They don’t tend to be much for chit-chat, and some of the written articles on technological history don’t interest them. The pictures, however, have created much more participation.

You can see here that not only did they comment on the images, but that they also replied a lot to each other (the bubble with the number is replies to the comment showing).

So I’m calling this one a success, and plan to do more!

Class annotation of images

Lisa M Lane

This is another post where I share how I did something, solely so I don’t forget how to do it.

Perusall is a wonderful program for annotating documents with a whole class, and I’m currently using it for all my online classes, which are located in the horror of an LMS they call Canvas. I upload a PDF, and students and I can highlight the document, with a panel popping up for discussion. When anyone clicks on the question mark, it indicates a request for responses. When anyone uses @Someone, it notifies them someone has responded. I have used it to solve the “what if they don’t do the reading?” problem, since we all kind of do the reading together.

All this is great. The system “auto-grades” (though I have to set it then check it very carefully), and pushes the grades to Canvas gradebook on my command, so I can focus on the discussion itself instead of evaluating it.

But you can’t do this with images — just upload and everyone talk about it.

Except…you can. Perusall won’t upload images natively, nor link to images directly on the web. So I downloaded an image, and saved it as a pdf in Preview, then uploaded it. Then I clicked on a section of the picture. Instead of highlighting text, Perusall put a pin. I can then ask a question or make a comment about just that portion of the image. Click the pin, and the conversation panel opens.

But the interface itself takes up a lot of the screen, which we don’t want for images. So I’m going to show students what to do about that:

If they do it, then it will look like this:

More room for the image, less clutter. I’m thinking it would be possible to put several images on a page to be discussed for that week.

What it’s doing is similar to ThingLink, which I learned about from our wonderful art historians over a decade ago. But ThingLink and similar programs, although they can be embedded into Canvas with iframes, cannot track a student’s comments, nor auto-grade them. Perusall can, which shortens my workflow so I can focus on the discussion, just as I do with annotated text.

So, annotations for images when I teach a European history course that focuses on the Humanities, and a History of Technology class that can get bogged down in text? I’m in!

 

Prepping adventures: the big questions

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

To the dismay of some of my colleagues, and the delight of others (and the total incomprehension of most), I am continually preparing the next class. So, even though it’s June and I’m teaching three classes that started last week, I am thinking seriously about Fall.

Fall for us begins in August, so it’s not that quirky. And next term, for the first time, I will have an intern. The SDICCA program in San Diego County, in association with San Diego State University, matches Masters students with community college professors*. The intern will work closely with me the entire year, attending my classes and campus meetings, and learning from me as his mentor.

This requires a certain meta approach from me as I design and teach my classes, particularly the on-site classes. This opportunity was one of the reasons I wanted to be a mentor. While my ego does not require a minion to learn things “my way” (on the contrary), I do require that things change up a bit to keep me on my toes. The necessity to explain why I do what I do, and to change things in response to someone else’s thinking, is a boon. Although I do change things in response to students all the time, the power relationship there is quite different than that between mentor/intern, particularly as I intend to make clear I hope to learn as much from him as he does from me.

But one thing I must “teach” is class discussion, my bugaboo. I have only one class where I really do it, my early American history online. At the beginning of the week, I post a 5-minute video from a series that considers “both sides” of an issue, and ends with a question (for example, “Was the Constitution a democratic document?”). The first few days of the week, I allow students to respond with their ill-informed opinions, vent, argue, etc. Then mid-week I summarize their contributions and reframe them, asking new questions based on their input that nevertheless point them toward deeper, thematic issues that connect to the assigned documents. It works well for them, but requires a lot of work from me: it is very much instructor-guided.

Although I have done this also in a classroom setting (using video clips from controversial issues in the news), I feel that these days some larger, philosophical issues should be considered. I do not want to simply increase polarized views by encouraging evidence-based arguments. My goal for teaching has always been to train a person see the news of the day and connect it to similar “news” from the past, to put today’s events into perspective. That’s what history is — context. THE context. It’s the way we know what the present might mean.

When I didn’t know that my modern European History class would be cancelled last spring, I prepared a list of such questions, one per week. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with them, and I never got to find out. (Don’t get me started on how students are being told by equity-minded individuals to avoid European history, and how they are avoiding classes that require deep thought so they can more easily achieve “academic success”.)

I tied each question to that week’s area of coverage:

  • 1 Story So Far
  • 2 17th c Politics and Culture
    Should only people who own homes vote? -or-
    At what point should society’s leaders no longer be allowed to lead?
  • 3 Science and Enlightenment
    How important is reason as opposed to emotion?
  • 4 Enlightenment Economy and Society
    How should a country’s economy be regulated, if at all?
  • 5 Political Revolution
    Is there a point where the people can get too much power?
  • 6 Industrial Revolution
    Should we help workers who don’t make enough to live on? how?
  • 7 Socialist and Romantic Response
    How do ethics come into politics?
  • 8 19th century society
    How important is it that people have definite roles in society?
  • 9 Nationalism and Imperialism
    Does nationalism necessarily lead to treating others poorly?
  • 10 Great War and Russian Revolution
    Does war settle disputes?
  • 11 The Interwar Years
    How can fiction help us understand the present?
  • 12 World War II
    Why do people become followers?
  • 13 The Cold War
    How does one find ones place in society?
  • 14 Social Revolution
    How can literature guide people’s views?
  • 15 The Contemporary West
    What issues or values should transcend politics?

So now, keeping in mind the need to connect their own opinions to the topic, I’m starting here for modern American history:

  • 1 US to 1865
    Why study American history?
  • 2 Reconstruction
    What might have been a better plan for Reconstruction, and what would have made it difficult?
  • 3 The West
    What happens when we see people from the past as victims as opposed to people with agency?
  • 4 Incorporation and Immigration
    How do immigrants become part of the American story?
  • 5 Empire
    Does America still have an empire?
  • 6 Progressivism
    What should be the government’s role when capitalism causes problems?
  • 7 The Great War
    How should Americans who oppose war be treated?
  • 8 The 1920s
    In what sense is progressive thinking countered by traditional thinking?
  • 9 The Depression
    What is the government’s role in alleviating suffering?
  • 10 WWII
    How should the U.S. respond to authoritarianism around the world?
  • 11 Post-war and Cold War Politics
    In what sense do fear and restrictions of civil liberties go together?
  • 12 The Fifties (culture)
    Why is celebrity culture so influential?
  • 13 War and Activism
    When a college tries to make its curriculum “relevant”, what does that mean?
  • 14 Inclusion and Exclusion
    Which is more important to social justice, the laws or the courts?
  • 15 New Millenium
    What have been the impacts of the internet?
  • 16 Contemporary US
    What is the role of the idea of “privilege” in contemporary discourse?

I am not sure that these are the exact questions, or how I want to use them in class, but it’s a start to think bigger.

 

*It’s interesting. We are called “professors” in the press and in the commencement program, but when I asked for this designation on my college business card, I was told no. We don’t even get “instructor” anymore, only “faculty”.

The hour before the deadline

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

We all have stories, usually told while shaking ones head, of how students do things at the last minute.

Long ago, the deadlines for my online classes were set at 5 pm on the day something was due. But “everyone else” (the dozen or so others teaching online) set theirs at Sunday midnight. I would receive panicked emails between 5 pm and midnight, or after an assignment was graded late. So my nicely planned evenings of sitting and marking papers didn’t work. I changed my deadlines to Sunday midnight.

So when I began using Perusall for annotations, I asked, repeatedly, for students to participate beginning on Tuesday and ending Sunday midnight. Some do so. But many try to read five documents and cram in all the annotations on Sunday. This prevents the close reading I had intended by assigning annotations in the first place, an issue for another post. But it also provides a bizarre opportunity.

Perusall emails me when a student answers a question I’ve posted.  It also emails when a student tags me with an @. Throughout each Sunday, these emails increase, with a flood of them in the last hour: 11 pm to midnight.

If I go into Perusall on Sunday night between 11 pm and midnight, I can participate in the discussion, adding questions and using @ to reply to individual students, and I’ll get a response. It becomes almost synchronous.

I’m not saying I do this every week and every class, but if I’ve assigned a particularly difficult document (last week’s Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer comes to mind), I can engage a great deal of the class at that hour.

No, I’m not recommending this. But it does seem to open potential for the last hour before the deadline. I have a colleague who uses Google Docs and notices that same activity shortly before the deadline — he sees the number of participant bubbles at the top increase as he watches.

So I wonder two things. First, is it safe now that we have many online classes to change deadlines to a more reasonable hour? And is the last hour before the deadline an opportunity to teach that we should be using?

Grade work, not students

Lisa M Lane

It seems like a technology thing, but it isn’t. Of Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas, only Moodle lets you grade posts, not students.

Bb and Canvas both let you use rubrics/ratings to grade discussions, but both want to grade by student rather than post. Canvas even forces you into one grade per student, regardless of how often they posted.

This is a perfect example of bad pedagogy embedded in the technology. It’s based on the idea of grading students, because students get the grades.

But I don’t grade students — I grade work. In forums for posting primary sources, I rate each source, using qualitative scales — primary source fulfilled, live link needed, full citation needed, etc. These correspond to number grades that go to the Gradebook, but what the student sees is the comment, indicating which corrections they need to make.

And in Moodle I can grade them all with drop downs, because a single, simple forum is all on one page. Super quick.

Bb and Canvas’ insistence on grading per student means several clicks per student, per class, every week, for every source posted. Bad pedagogy, bad workflow.

Perhaps if these LMSs considered that we were grading work rather than students, it wouldn’t be designed like this. When a student asks “did you grade me down?” or “when you grade me, remember I have four classes”, I always point out that I never grade them, only their work.

How did we get to a place where the default is to grade students? Is it our educational culture, associating a person’s work with who they are? Surely that’s a bad idea. When we conflate a person with their work, we imply that their work is not only a product of themselves, it is their self. Every critique become a critique of the self.

We mustn’t embed bad ideas into immutable systems. Really.

 

Embedding Hypothes.is in Canvas

Lisa M Lane

This is one of those posts I’m writing so I don’t forget how to do something.

After testing Hypothes.is for annotations, and realizing that the Redirect Tool in canvas would force an ordinary webpage with annotations to only open in a new tab, I figured out something.

Canvas will only embed secure (SSL) pages (those with an address starting https://). All my web pages are just plain ole http. But it turns out that my host, Lunarpages, can create an SSL page by just using the URL of the server (https://fand.lunarserver.com/username + rest of the URL). So any page I already have can become a secure page by using this URL instead.

So to make this happen automatically, here’s the workflow:

1. Create my own webpage with text and images.

2. Include the hypothes.is code in the HTML of the page

https://hypothes.is/embed.js

3. Use the Redirect Tool in Canvas, using the URL of the page, but with the Lunarpages server preface (in this case https://fand.lunarservers.com/~lisahi2/)

redirectapp

4. Voila:

hypothesisincanvas

Floating discussion as a new fix for an old problem

Lisa M Lane

Online discussion often sucks. The prompts are answered best by the first few go-getting students, and everyone else can only agree. Or the prompt is designed to elicit opinion in order to prevent repetition, and devolves into the sharing of personal beliefs without much connection to the class. I’ve avoided the whole thing by making my forums focused on posting primary sources.

Then there’s the issue of where to put the discussion. One giant discussion board with many topics and multiple clicking? A discussion each week, where ideas are abandoned as the class moves on?

Having eliminated weekly discussion as being useless, I have been putting one main forum at the top of each class (called the Coffee House, or Pub, or Tavern, depending on the class). I ask them to post their introductions there at the beginning of the class, but since I don’t require it for a grade, hardly any one participates after the first few weeks. That’s not surprising – all the rest of the work is listed in a weekly block. Why should anyone go back to do anything at the top of the page?

Right now, the last weeks of class are upon us. In my modern US History classes, I decided to add a discussion of current events,  to take place in the last week. Instead of creating a new forum, I just moved my Coffee House to the final week’s block.

migratingdisc

Then it hit me – I could do that throughout the semester. Have one big board with topics, but add each topic when I move the forum to the weeks they belong. For example, the first week in US History is Reconstruction, but I don’t want a discussion in the first week, while they’re getting used to the class. But when we get to the next week, on The West, I have a question about victimization that makes for good discussion. I could add that at the beginning of that week, then keep pulling the forum down to the weeks where there’s really something do discuss. The forum would migrate according to the week’s topics.

Since I haven’t done this before, I might want to make it extra credit with an expectation to post, rather than a required element.

The advantage would be that all previous discussion would be available each time, and the tracking would be easy with only one forum.  Might be a good idea…

A really good start

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Every semester I encourage students to start their online class by posting in the forum (variably called the Pub, or Coffee House, or Taverna, depending on the class). I usually ask them to do a couple of things, like update their Profile, take a distance ed readiness quiz, and introduce themselves. Although I encourage them to reply to each other and make connections, I always have classes where it’s all left-justified responses to my post – they don’t talk to each other.

This semester is totally different – they’re all talking about what it’s like to take an online class, and what their hopes are for this one, and how they’re getting organized to stay on track (not staying on track is, to my mind, the #1 reason for failure in online classes).

What made the difference? Well, I made a video about the class, but I’ve done that before. No, I’m convinced it was putting this video, usually just a link for the class, embedded right there in the forum.

I’m guessing that they “see themselves” in the video, students like themselves. They watch it because it’s right there at the start of the class, inside the discussion, right at the top.

The video is patched together from last year’s extra credit assignment, where I asked students to make a video clip with advice for new online MiraCosta students. I graded them higher if they filmed on campus and offered a really good tip. They had to give me permission to use their video publicly. Then I just edited and uploaded to YouTube.

It will be interesting to see how things go from here. Will they talk more in the posting forums, where discussion is not required? I don’t even have a grade for discussion or contribution this semester. Will they stay motivated? Will they stay enrolled? Let’s find out.

Whose discussion? (my 500th post)

Lisa M Lane

For years, I didn’t have a “discussion” in my online classes. When I changed the discussion forum to a workspace, a place for students to post primary sources to support their writing, I didn’t miss the “I agree” posts or the obvious display of ignorance intended to pad a certain number of posts a week.

What started cropping up, though, were bits of discussion. A reply to a primary source, or to a writing assignment, because a student was particularly moved or related to the subject. And there didn’t seem to be enough opportunity to discuss issues in history, controversies and interesting perspectives that weren’t covered in the material. Plus, it was clear to me that the students had too many writing assignments. I was asking for them weekly, not very big assignments, but because they were scaffolded they required a lot of grading and feedback. That was hard to do with so many students, and they were getting bored with the work even if I wasn’t getting bored reading them.

So last summer, where the 16-week class is compressed to 8 weeks anyway, I had the students writing weekly, but there was also a discussion. I assigned students to groups randomly once the enrollment settled down. Then I made simple instructions, and modeled by leading the first discussions myself.

disc1

discfirsttopic

In the third week or so, I posted the student-led discussion forums, with instructions like this:

Grading was just rolled into the Contribution Assessment grade at mid-term and at the end of the class.

The result was excellent last summer, so I decided to keep it going this year. I model the first two discussions with questions and ongoing participation, then the groups are supposed to take over. This semester has been very different from last summer, however. A couple of groups had to be contacted to remind them to start discussion. One student wrote me complaining that another student had plagiarized his discussion question off of an educational website instead of creating his own. Now in Week 12, the discussion participants are fewer in every class.

So what’s different?

1. The instructions are a little more specific.
Last summer I was pretty vague, and didn’t insist that they connect topics to lecture or readings. While I added this to bring the focus onto the course materials, it may have stifled some freedom.

2. The discussions are every other week in the 16-week format.
This may have encouraged lost attention and boredom over time. A shorter, compressed format seems to keep focus better in general. This may be a good argument for 8-week classes.

3. The Contribution Assessment happened only once.
I was doing a mid-term and end-of-term assessment, but dropped the latter because the point of it was to help students recognize and improve their performance, and it’s too late to do that at the end of the class. But I may have gotten rid of a stick/carrot motivation for participating in discussion during the last half of the semester.

4. The students are different.
Last summer I had one Western Civ class full of university students, and one US History class full of typical community college students. At the start of the term, the university students were gung-ho, then they faded. The community college students’ behavior was reversed — they started slowly and gradually became more engaged. So I assumed that I would see similar patterns. But in all of this term’s five sections, there is just one pattern — about a dozen particular students are really into discussion, and the others are just posting to post. I can tell because they don’t reply to each others’ posts, just to my prompt.

So what to do for this summer? I think I should keep the format. But for next fall? Should I create my own discussions? Drop them again? Gotta think on this one.

 

 

That Community Thing

Lisa M Lane 10 Comments

I’ve studied some about creating community in online classes, and we’re working on the topic this week in the POT Cert Class. And yet, I don’t do it. Create community, I mean, as an instructor.

Unlike in many online classes, my discussion forums are not set up for discussion. I do have a number of posts required, but each post has a purpose: one is for posting a primary source, the second one for responding to my guidance with a thesis and mini-essay, and a third to help someone else. I do not provide conversation prompts because my goal is not conversation.

However, in the very first forum, where I ask them to introduce themselves, either community forms or it doesn’t. And it stays that way the whole semester.

If, in the first forum, the first few students posting begin by responding to other students in a chatty and friendly way, instead of just introducing themselves and leaving, the others follow suit and the class takes off and community forms quickly. Participation and conversation levels remain high throughout the class, even in all the other forums where only posting their own work is required.

If, in that first forum, people only do as instructed and introduce themselves, and few comment on each other’s introductions, the community never takes off and the forum remains a posting board. This happens regardless of whether I, as the instructor, participate by welcoming people or not.

Interestingly, the level of student success in the forums doesn’t seem affected by which way it goes. They help each other at the same level regardless, because those trying to get an A are required to offer a helper reply to someone each week. Performance and learning seem unaffected by whether or not they form a community, but they clearly have more fun and make more social connections. Such support likely does have an effect I cannot see, perhaps engendering confidence and reducing fear.

But I wonder the extent to which it’s up to the students to form community anyway, even in classes where instructors are trying to force engagement and conversation?

Visual tricks for instructor forum posts

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

As wonderful as the leveling effect of online classes can be, it is occasionally inconvenient for the instructor of an online class to be just another voice in the forum.

I love Moodle’s nested forums, and the way it shows everyone’s profile image, but even these visual cues aren’t enough to say, “Instructor post! Pay attention!”.

A bit of HTML to the rescue. I’m currently using a Horizontal Rule in a color to mark off my posts just a little bit, without being jarring.

The code I put at the beginning and end of my post is just

<hr size=2 color=blue>

If I wanted to be even more obvious, I could change the background color of my posts, which is what we do with the sticky posts at Pedagogy First! This would be just:

<body bgcolor="silver">

or

<bg color="silver">

depending on the LMS. One could also use all italics or a different text color, but I prefer to use something that students wouldn’t ordinarily be doing in their own posts.

Such a little thing, but it can really make a difference on a page full of posts!

 

 

When feedback isn’t seen as feedback

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

It’s taken me almost a year to figure out what might have gone wrong with last summer’s class. I need to take a look since this summer’s class starts Monday.

Last summer, thrilled at having only 40 students to tend to in an 8-week class, I had students post their historical theses in the forums instead of on a closed essay exam. I graded them according to a qualitative scale that translated into points, and made comments on each directly in the forums, which took a great deal of time.

I was at first so very happy with this method, having spent much time setting it up so beautifully. Then the class was over, and I got the evaluation, completed by only 16 students.
Ignoring the typical one-person-who-hates-everything-I-do student, 5 felt class expectations weren’t stated clearly. A surprising 6 didn’t find the Contribution Assessments helpful (these contain direct feedback for each and every student, in private), and though 14 said they read my comments on their own mini-essays in the forum, 2 thought I wasn’t even present and visible during class. Some comments on the open essays said:

“It would be helpful if we received more feedback on our short essays instead of a general comments so that we could improve our writing skills.”

“For someone who struggles with the weekly thesis maybe a little more information but since it was a summer class it was face paced. I enjoyed the class the grading was fair just needed a better understanding of the thesis but that could just be me.”

“I think more feedback on the essays is necessary. The only kind of feedback that I received was if something was wrong with my essay, but it would be nice to know the things that I’m doing well so that I could continue incorporating things into the essays that worked well.”

“I wish there was more direction for the writing assignments. Especially the final assessment.”

It has thus occurred to me that the continual, extensive feedback I gave several times a week on the posted essays was not seen as actual feedback or guidance by some of the students.

Keep in mind before you say I’m justing whining, that I give this evaluation every semester, and the overwhelming majority say my expectations are clear, the assignments are helpful, and the things they recommend tend to be things like “more content” or “less work”. Keep in mind also that my public comments on their essays were very specific, but kind and designed not to embarrass anyone. I also marked some of them with a bold For Everyone tag in the subject line, to provide more general comments at the same time. I thought this was brilliant — evidently not so much.

I can’t help but wonder whether doing closed essay grading instead, even if I said the exact same thing on each essay, would have led to a different result. Is it possible that forum postings from the instructor aren’t seen as feedback in the same way we view a private comment on a quiz?

So for the class that starts Monday, I have put the essays back into a standard, private, midterm and final exam format, with (as usual) the practice in the forums. We’ll see what happens.

Should “discussion” be separate?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

This question goes way back to the first online class I ever saw demonstrated. The instructor, instead of using our one and only technology (Webboard) as a separate discussion, had embedded her lecture and instructions into the lead post for each week. And at the time (1998) I thought, “oh wow! the whole class is inside the discussion! This is great.”.

But I didn’t do it. Blackboard encourages you to put the discussion board in separate area, and even now that you can make a separate discussion forum for each unit, people still put discussion all together as one course menu item. In Moodle, I have a separate, nested discussion board (simple format) for each week/topic.

In my struggle to determine whether it’s a good idea to switch from forum post/reply to blog/comment format for clases with students, I have assumed that I would continue to integrate discussion as I do now, by week. But in my post about using One Blog, Brandon Davis-Shannon commented on his own difficulties with the format, and noted greater depth in the Blackboard forum than on blogs with comments. It occurred to me this might be because if the whole thing was together, students would feel less  awkward posting on a previous topic.

But we all acknowledge it depends on how it’s designed, and what (pedagogically speaking) we’re looking for.

So I created a Google Doc and invited Brandon to help create a chart showing some of the options, and here’s what we’ve done so far:

One big forum Weekly/topical forums One big blog Individual blogs
Advantages
  • May reward students posting on previous topics, deepening conversation, especially if design of the discussion encourages them to do so
  • Easy to use
  • Ties discussion to one topic, prevents tangents
  • Organizes posts and replies easily
  • Combines course info and activities in one place
  • Easy to track student activity
  • Easy for students to keep up with peers’ work
  • Requires a single log-in to participate
  • Possible feeling of collective student ownership of class blog.
  • Student ownership of their own learning space
  • Acquisition of some “just in time” technical skills within the context of actual use
  • Aggregating blogs can pull whole class together
Disadvantages
  • Artificially separates discussion and interactivity from the presented or informational content of the class
  • May overwhelm students with number of topics, as class continues.
  • Format doesn’t encourage students to go back to a previous topic, leading to a more superficial discussion.
  • Student ownership is not individual
  • Format may lead student posts to be lost in the shuffle
  • Blog may disappear if instructor takes it down, loses account, etc[a].
  • Unless commenting takes place on an aggregated blog (thus removing ownership advantage), the inconvenience of commenting on different blogs may be a problem
  • Diffuses the conversation too much
  • Discourages return to previous topics because of the nature of blog posting
  • Tends to require multiple log-ins to participate in commenting unless single system use (for example, Discus)
Pedagogy May be best suited for:

  • classes where themes run throughout
  • assignments that allow students to participate in several topics at once
  • pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
 May be best suited for:

  • topics that need to be separate
  • assignments where everyone has a similar task, such as posting a particular link
  • classes where topics have a definite progression or need to move on
  • pedagogies that want to place the information and content directly into the forum to emphasize discussion
 May be best suited for:

  • keeping the class at one main website or page
  • having students experience creation of one artifact with individual contributions
  • pedagogies emphasizing collective development of the class
  • situations where individual blogs may be of concern for any reason
 May be best suited for:

  • student ownership of their work
  • pedagogies that encourage student exploration and development of their own topics or focus
  • if the instructor has a blog also and content is aggregated, embeds instructor’s content into class
  • a course with centralized complementary activities
Variations
  • All class materials can be available as posts
  • Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
  • All class materials can be available as posts
  • Can choose between threaded and nested in some applications
 Theme (Layout?) Theme (Layout?)

Maybe this can help us make decisions on which discussion format is best for a particular class.

Class design: is One Blog the middle ground?

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

I have now been a student in three separate classes where I ran my own blog to do the class assignments (CCK08, EC&I831 and ds106).  My classes for students are all designed with an LMS-based forum, within which outcomes have been achieved well thus far (I implemented the basic format in 2009).

So now, as I consider departing from an LMS for at least one of my classes for spring, the question is: should I have each student create his/her own blog, then aggregate them, and have them comment on each others’ blogs for discussion? That’s been the model in all three classes I’ve taken, and is the model for Pedagogy First!, where we’ve been using 90 individual blogs for the POT Certificate Class, aggregated to one central website.

But is this the best way for my own classes?

In a more typical online class, discussion takes place in a forum. This keeps things focused and in one place. People are used to forums. All the classes I’ve seen with distributed activities instead of forums have students begging for a forum, whether it’s a threaded forum in an LMS, a Google group, or a Ning. People want a central place to talk, and an aggregated blog made of up all their disparate posts can become just an information center, not a coffee house.

My brilliant colleague Jim Sullivan teaches English composition using a class blog. Students are all authors on it, and they blog there, not on their own blogs. We’ve discussed this many times, and I’ve rejected it because students don’t control their own space. I think they should, but I’m aware that the idea of helping hundreds of students with their technical problems has been a major hurdle to moving ahead. Now it occurs to me that Jim’s approach may be the pedagogically middle ground rather than just easier and more convenient for me (I like pedagogical middle grounds).

A traditional forum in an LMS is set in its pattern and closed in its format (once the class is over, you usually can’t access it). Having everyone create their own blog lets students have their own permanent space, but really doesn’t encourage discussion (as I’ve discovered running Pedagogy First!). Is the One Blog approach the middle ground?

Is it open and available?

It can be open and as loose as I want, and since I run my own WordPress I can promise it will stay open (Jim runs his own Typepad).

Is there a sense of student ownership?

While students don’t run their own space, students may feel that the One Blog is their space collectively, rather than individually (a classroom they can help create). This could subconsciously create a feeling of community.

Does it provide a good place for discussion?

Yes — not as much as a traditional forum, but more than individual blogs, because it is in one place and everyone is signed in just once, rather than being a guest on other people’s blogs. Plus, WordPress comments are nested. I have searched long and hard and have been unable to find forum software that is free, nests the comments so you can see which comments reply to which, and will tolerate multimedia.

Isn’t Ning a middle ground?

Ning is a social networking platform, a damned good one (nested! multimedia!), but to use it for free you have to advertise for Pearson. That isn’t middle ground — if there’s any advertising in my class at all (and I think there shouldn’t be) it should be incidental, not deliberate and appearing as if I am a spokesperson sponsoring a product (in many ways, this includes Blackboard and Moodle). And I don’t have time right now to figure out how to use an open source social networking platform (such as Oxwall) on my own service.

Although until now I’ve only used blogging for class as a student, I do use the blog platforms for my History 103 and History 104 at San Elijo. They’re not actually blogging on these (in terms of reflection or graded items), but rather posting theses for papers they turn in, and working together to create collections for class presentations. I could start by expanding this set-up into the One Blog format.

Sooooo…..

what am I not thinking of here as I make this decision?

 

Lab Day!

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Over the last few years of developing a technique I’m happy with in discussion forums (see Discussion Goodness from 2009), I’ve also been experimenting with something similar in the classroom at San Elijo. I’ve done it for three semesters now, and I’m happy with it too.

                 Image by permission and copyrighted Lisa M Lane 2011

The idea is that every two weeks, we have “Lab Day”. On that day, everyone who has a laptop has to bring one (a smartphone is OK, just not as good for searching images), and Media Services brings me a batch of old clunker PCs without batteries for everyone else. There are cords all over the floor, and students arranged in small groups.

The task, during our 75 minute class, is to create a collection of three primary sources related to that week’s era, then develop athesis and present it to the class with the evidence. All work is posted on the class website.

Students search the web for primary sources related to, say, the French Revolution. They have to be sure that they really are primary sources (not a drawing of a guillotine from 1947), and the sources can be visual or textual (I usually prefer visual). They post them with citations and create a thesis for which their sources are evidence.

The class website (here’s the one from last spring)  is on a WordPress platform, and the students have basic accounts. During the semester, they work on the website in two ways: by posting their homework thesis every Monday (after reading the textbook chapter) and by creating these source collections on Lab Day. I use several plugins to make it easy for students to post the media they find (mostly plugins that create a toolbar for a comment, since they’re all posting as comments).   My student Nick asked me to add a “Like” button so they could rate each others’ theses, so I did that too.

Each group has their own space to work (these are Categories in WordPress), and they use comments so that all their sources appear on the same page.

At the beginning of the semester, each group just collects three sources, and talks about how they related to each other at the end of the period. Since it’s early, I often create topics for them (i.e. “find portrait paintings from the 18th century” for Group 1, and “find examples of residential architecture during the Enlightenment” for Group 2). But as the class progresses, we move from more factual discussions of sources into interpretations and theses. Near the end of the semester, they are able to analyze the sources to say something meaningful as a historical theme, with examples from many eras.

Near the end of the period, the group s present (I let them decide if they want a spokesperson or the whole group to come up — interestingly, about 80% of the time the entire group stands up front together).  We have a projector that shows the website on the front screen s they present. Again, after the first time (when things are very new and strange), six groups of students can manage all this during one class period.

What’s interesting is that, as with my online classes, the students have some freedom to select the sources they want, so the focus of the presentation often reflects the interest of group members. As we get into broader theses, some groups develop a “specialty area” (say, war propaganda or women’s fashions). I also notice that there are hardly any absences on Lab Day! Students from home log in with TinyChat to talk to their group and participate because they don’t want to miss it. This is even though Lab Day is not graded directly, but rather just counts as part of Contribution.

The benefits of the exercise are several. The main one is affective: students enjoy working in groups and finding things on the internet, and they like having a self-contained class session where everything is immediate. Another benefit is that they get comfortable presenting early on – sharing becomes second-nature instead of something scary. They also get practice with the central historical skills (also our Student Learning Outcomes) of identifying primary sources, developing a historical thesis, and using the evidence to support the thesis. And they do it an environment that is quickly seen as non-threatening (I evaluate sometimes, we have peer evaluations sometimes, and sometimes we just do what we do). I can also provide in-person help as I walk around, with the website, with finding sources, with identifying sources, with whatever.

The drawbacks? I can’t really think of any, except when the network goes down or the technology gets funky. Or when there aren’t enough devices. But, in an emergency, we can do something similar with images from our textbook, or from collections I can bring up on the screen. It’s just not as cool that way.

A funny thing happened on the way to the…

Lisa M Lane 8 Comments

We don’t have a forum at our POT Certificate Class SMOOC (Small-to-Medium Open Online Class). Nor a Google Group (though that’s been suggested and may appear), nor a Moodle forum, nor a Ning.

When I took EC&I 831 from Alec Couros last fall, I felt we needed a forum, and he and I looked for one we liked, but nothing we found had the particular combination we wanted (no ads, free, nested comments and the ability to post multimedia), so we gave it up. On his current page for this semester, he’s listed many types of communication, but not a forum.

And now I notice that the Change MOOC, co-hosted by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, has a forum, but it’s kinda awkward. Not like a full-featured thing at all. On the main page, there are three Participating links for blogs, two for the newsletter, one for the backchannel, and one for threads. The class starts tomorrow and there are three posts for a class of hundreds.

And yet, all my college history classes feature forums as the heart of the action. I couldn’t do without them.

So why no forums for these classes? I think because the idea of distributed communication has become something we’re all taking seriously.

If we’re going to focus on the wonders of learning on the web as our topic, it makes sense that our participants should be communicating there rather than in a central location. We not only want them communicating via blogs, wikis and Facebook, but we also want them creating their own places and spaces (which is why the potcert11 class may yet have a Google Group, because the participants may be creating it — and they’re starting the Twitter thing, not me).

chart
From Rick Schwier’s Pursuing the elusive metaphor
of community in e-learning environments

I also think there’s more staying power to a distributed community. If you have one space, as we all know from using learning management systems, the course seems finite. Even if the space is available after the class is over, the feeling is still that the class is over. But if the conversation is distributed (our class has a very active Facebook group, which surprised the heck out me), there’s a feeling of perpetuity. The river continues and you step in and out when you wish.

As Rick Schwier has noted, informal communities have higher levels of engagement over time. I wonder whether de-emphasizing a formal location for conversation makes these classes lean more toward informal learning, even though they are organized as classes, with set timeframes.

So come on, hit me with the research. Do distributed communities last longer? Are we right to “force” them instead of offering a rich place for a single discussion?

The joy of revision

Lisa M Lane

Although I haven’t taught summer in two decades, I am doing it now – an 8-week, 3 unit class in Western Civ, online. That’s double-speed, so I’ve gotten rid of the textbook (and instead spent hours writing multiple-choice questions on my lectures to check content retention) and am heavily relying on my two-step discussion forum technique for students to find their own sources and practice historical skills.

During the regular semester, I have at least 200 students (40 for each of 5 class sections) over 16 weeks. That’s too many for me to do as much individual feedback as I would like, so I’ve developed various methods for giving group feedback that’s valuable, and limited individual feedback to essay questions on exams and answers to their questions in the forums.

Here we are compressed, so the content has been combined. But the forum technique is the same. Each week they must post a primary source related to the (now twice as long) historical era by Wednesday. Then I come in on Thursday to guide the discussion, then they create a historical thesis mini-essay by Sunday.

During a regular semester, this wasn’t really an essay – it was just a thesis and brief outline, and it wasn’t graded separately, but as a part of the general Contribution grade. Then they would write a “real” essay in a private quiz, and I would grade it.

In order to reduce workload for summer, I am having them post a full essay each week by Sunday, and am grading it as if it were the quiz essay, right there in the forum. Here have been the considerations.

1. How to grade them

I am using Moodle, and created a scale like this for forum ratings (the “lowest grade” setting is to force Moodle to start the points at 50% instead of 0):

The idea was that on Monday, I’d just go down the essay posts and grade them, but…

2. Public or private?

On the first forum, which didn’t count for points, I graded them openly, so that everyone could see everyone’s ratings (it only shows the qualitative comment, not the number of points). I asked in the Facebook group if they liked this, and several students said they didn’t mind, but there weren’t enough students to tell what they all wanted. So for the next two forums, I’ve kept them closed – students can only see their own ratings.

3. Revision

The first week of grading, I noticed that some mini-essays could have gotten a higher score if they’d had some feedback. When students left feedback, it was often really helpful, but there was not mechanism for revision. During the regular semester, I can’t really do this, come back to an assignment twice to grade and regrade, but why not, with only 40 students?

So that’s what’s happening. They submit their mini-essay, then I ask them to comment on each others’ (which they are supposed to do anyway), and I comment on them too, then they can post again with “REVISED” in the subject line, and I grade that one instead.

I started getting confused – had I graded this one already? So I reset the Forum preference to just show the Maximum rating. That way, if I grade a mini-essay twice by mistake, the student will only get the highest score.

It’s remarkable to me what a difference this is making in their grades and how much work they are putting into the class!

The level of emotional connection in this class is not high (these are mostly university students just trying to get through – they rejected my offer for a synchronous session to talk to me), but the amount of learning is increased anyway.

So two lessons from this:

1. With lower class size, the opportunity for individual feedback, and thus student success, is much higher.

2. An emotional, “friend”, “like” connection between instructor and students, or among students, is not as important in learning a skill as how much work is put into the learning

Primary sources and social networking

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

All the student learning outcomes and objectives for my History classes come down to this: the ability to create a historical thesis and defend it by using primary sources. Without these skills, students just aren’t doing history.

The past couple of years I have revamped my courses so they focus on these skills, practiced over and over. Students do it in a constructivist way in the forums, where they post their choice of primary sources and create theses from them each week. They are assessed both as a group and later as individuals on quiz essays.

Whenever I make a change in a course, I track it carefully over time. I have seen the problems I expected to see, and have made tutorials, FAQs and feedback (both group and individual) to answer the issues: using a primary source instead of the textbook, finding primary sources, translating the skill from discussion forum to quiz essay. Citing the sources seemed to be a particular problem last semester.

So all this semester I provided resources and feedback about how to cite a photo or other visual primary source. But this obstacle is proving much more difficult. On the final exams, even when they use primary sources, they don’t cite them properly.

No, before you get out those style sheets, it’s not a problem of MLA or parenthetical citations. The problem is that they are citing each other.

Whichever student posts a source in a forum becomes the origin of the source.

Here’s an example. Megan posts an image of Jane Addams with children at Hull House. The correct citation would be something like:

Photographer unknown, “Jane Addams with a group of immigrant children” (1889), State Historical Society of Wisconsin, found at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/photos/html/1130.html.

Another student is writing a post or essay, and wants to use the photo. Instead of citing it correctly, he writes “Megan’s photo of Jane Addams” as the citation.

This isn’t an occasional thing. It’s been a consistent issue this whole year.

It happens even when they’re told not to do it, and shown many examples, and I model proper citation in my own posts. And I wonder whether it’s bigger than not following instructions.

Doesn’t social networking change the definition of a “source”? Your “friends” are now a source of information, and the trail by which they got it is often convoluted, and comes through other friends.

I think it’s because of how they share information that students won’t cite the photographer, artist, or author, or think it’s important to find out who it is. It’s easier to cite Jeff’s post, Jessica’s image, Joshua’s web site. And it makes more sense. After all, it was Jeff/Jessica/Joshua who went to all the trouble to find the source and post it for everyone to use. Why shouldn’t they get the credit?

Am I on to something? Or should I just be rounding up the usual suspects (not following instructions, being unprepared, not reading the feedback, etc)?

Virtual Attendance: “Here!”

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

To see the weirdness of this story, first keep one thing in mind: I have no attendance policy. What I have is 10% of the final grade as “Contribution”. I changed it from “Participation”. That’s it. I indicated they were free to come and go, and I only occasionally take roll.

This semester, students are bringing laptops for “lab day”, when each group posts a thesis with supporting visuals at my new WordPress-based class website. They work for about half an hour together, then each group’s work is put up on the screen and they get up and talk about what they did. I use the reports to construct essay questions for tests.

Last time we had “lab”, two students emailed me they’d be missing class. I suggested they come to their group’s website workspace during class time from home, and see if they could watch what was being posted and maybe contribute a picture or two.

These workspaces are asynchronous, just a category page for each group with comments enabled. Some groups have one person write their thesis and post images in a single reply, while other students go out on the web finding images or help construct the thesis. Both students were from the same group, so I told them to post a reply saying they were there. That seemed slow. So I opened a chat room in Chatterous (I couldn’t remember Stinto, which is better). They posted in the replies to come to the chat room, and eventually both students did. That was cool.

Today was more cool. Three students couldn’t come, but only one emailed me. I opened a Stinto chat room immediately (this was an hour before class, and Stinto rooms stay open for a couple of hours if not used) and sent her the URL. I also posted it on the syllabus. The other two students, it turned out, found their way there, and before long several groups were in the chat.

But we had time to work — wouldn’t it be better to see and hear the student who had emailed? I asked how we could do that. One student said we could use Skype. I asked, “do you have Skype on her computer?” She said, “We all have Skype”. So she opened Skype and told the student in the chat room her Skype name, and the student could hear and see her group.

It was pretty thrilling to call roll (well, I did it today) and automatically call her name, not thinking, and hear a resounding “Here!” from the laptop. The other two students were fine with Stinto chat or just helping in the workspace: one provided just the picture Group 6 needed of the Pantheon and couldn’t find.

What’s all the participation about? Are we having fun building things and working together? My only goal was to make the collection, processing and reporting of resources easier, but students seem to care about being there to the point where they’ll be there, wherever they are. “Here!” indeed!

Don’t attend or participate. Contribute!

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

Today I went through my grading pages and everywhere changed the word “participation” to “contribution”.

At the half-way point and again at the end of the semester, I ask students to do a self-assessment. Both together are worth 20% of the class grade, and it’s here where I “grade” their discussion forum posts. In these self-assessments, some students admit that they’ve done little to help others, or haven’t posted much in the forum. A few critique my class, saying they shouldn’t have to participate in a forum, they don’t like posting, they don’t think what their colleagues post is helpful, blah blah blah.

Of course, my forums are no longer “discussion” or “reflection”. It isn’t enough anymore to just “participate” — students must add content to the collection, and their own interpretation of a portion of that content in the form of a historical thesis. The expectation that they help each other has been there, but it’s not explicit unless you reference the grading pages.

Studies have shown that this generation of students will need to be able to create things and work in groups, including in an online environment. They need experience at teamwork. But even without this sociological stuff, there’s the old adage that you get out of an experience what you put into it. What they put into my class can’t just be their own private work shared with me. That would be fine if I were a tutor at Oxford, but I’m at a community college with 200 students starting each semester. We must help each other, whether it’s trendy or not. We must create our own norms, feed each others’ minds.

I know some professors who mark a student absent if s/he’s sleeping in class. Aside from the arguments about sleeping in class (sometimes students need to, and I don’t wake them up or take offense), the idea is that if they aren’t awake they can’t listen. Listening isn’t enough.

So, students! What are you bringing to class that will make class better, a more vibrant learning environment? Being a good audience? As a professor, I have tired of planning moving and engaging scenes and acting them out, hoping for a good response. Who am I, Shakespeare? This is education, not a Restoration comedy. Coming to class prepared to watch by reading the play ahead of time is good, but in what way are you taking part?

The “Participation Assessment” is now a “Contribution Assessment”. The grading rubric now says “Contribution to the Class” as the column heading instead of “Participation”. A small change in language, yes, but I hope it will emphasize that I expect my students to contribute to the class rather than merely attend or simply participate.

Student-created content and a big weird thang

Lisa M Lane 7 Comments

As a historian, it is my job to teach students about different kinds of sources. As part of my desire to have students DO more history, I asked students to form collections of primary sources in weekly discussion forums, then develop theses about them. I developed a whole new method this year to do that. In many ways it’s been totally cool (see this post), but now, at the end of the semester, there’s a big element of failure as I read the final exams.

Despite ongoing reminders that their colleagues are not primary sources, I continue to read many exams that cite other students’ posts instead of actual sources to support the thesis. I wrote about this almost every week in the forums, once I noticed it happening there.

There’s a big difference between using what Harry posted (a photograph of an H-bomb explosion) and what Harry said about it (“what a big boom!”). They are actually quoting each other as if they are sources themselves. I even had a student quote her own post.

I can’t tell whether this is just laziness, or total misunderstanding, or an extension of their overly-developed self-esteem, but I’ve never seen this before. When I asked them to “use the primary sources that have been posted in the forum”, it never occurred to me they’d do this. I begin to wonder about all this educational push toward student-created content, and what it’s led students to believe about that content. They seem to think that their writing is on the same level as that of a professional historian, worthy of citation.

I really loved the collections of sources they made, and I plan to add something more to the beginning of the class about distinguishing sources because I really don’t want to do away with this idea. But this problem is adding a whole other layer to the difficulty students already have distinguishing a primary source (something created at the time we’re studying) from a secondary source (an article or textbook about that timeframe).

Is this something constructivists deal with all the time?

FERPA Schmerpa, the LMS and open ed

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I’ve been involved in a discussion with an online teaching colleague about FERPA and its implications. Periodically, FERPA issues emerge, usually at the administrative level. I’ve seen this at a number of institutions of higher ed. Faced with a law that seems to protect student privacy (even when it allows, in my opinion, violations such as the release of ones address in a directory), colleges tend to take a draconian approach to prevent lawsuits (and loss of federal funding, though this has apparently never happened). Everything educationally open one might want to do could be a potential FERPA violation, including blogging, content creation, bookmark sharing, and commenting on the open web. My colleague’s concern in particular was whether it was OK to post evaluative instructor comments on a student’s open blog.

Image cc by xiaming at Flickr

In the course of our discussion we looked at a discussion about FERPA and Web 2.0, plus some campus policies and checklists (like this one from Oregon and this one from Winona and this from University of North Florida) as well as the law itself. Since I’ve been teaching for 20 years, I’ve heard several times that I must not post grades where students are identifiable on the list, and I know that some colleges say secret names are OK but others say not. Colleges differ in how they interpret FERPA. Most of the interpretations date from the pre-internet era, though some like the Virginia Commonwealth University have an updated version specific to online — it’s not very different, though.

I have not worried too much about FERPA since I discovered the 2002 Supreme Court decision in Owasso Independent School Dist. No. I011 v. Falvo, where the Oyez site notes:

In a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Court held that Peer grading does not violate FERPA. The Court reasoned that peer-graded items did not constitute education records protected by FERPA until a teacher collected the grades on the students’ papers or other items and recorded the grades in the teacher’s grade book. In reaching its conclusion, the Court noted that peer-graded items were not “maintained” within in the meaning of FERPA, as the student graders only handled the items for a few moments. Moreover, the Court stated that each student grader, by grading assignments, did not constitute a person acting for an educational institution within FERPA.

As far as I’m concerned, this covers most of the things I do that might be perceived by someone as problematic.

In all my online classes, every week, students post evidence in a forum, then create a thesis and post it. I do “evaluate” these theses in a sense, though I do not “grade” them, by commenting on the theses of several students on the forum, noting which are factual and which interpretive and why. I occasionally ask students to take on a colleague’s thesis and say how it could be improved.

Is this peer grading? It could be, except that the comments are not “grades” — they don’t “stick” nor are they recorded individually in the gradebook. But in student self-evaluations (the private part with just the student and me), students comment on their own achievements and I put a grade on the combined effort of eight weeks of forum work.

I frankly don’t see a whole lot of difference between this and what I do in an my on-site class when groups do presentations and I comment aloud on how they did, strengths and weaknesses, to expand the discussion. It’s instant feedback, but the purpose is to keep all of us on the same subject at the same time. If I gave them feedback and asked questions later and privately, only that particular group would learn, and by then the class will have moved on. Sometimes students peer grade the presentations, and I post every group’s combined “grade” and comments, although these do not translate to anything formal since I don’t grade groups at all except as part of a student’s participation grade.

To me, posting/presenting and commenting is open work and open education — for my online classes, this process is behind a wall right  now only because I’m in a Learning Management System (Moodle), but it shouldn’t be. If I instead used a Ning, I could set it to be closed, “just for students”, but I’d like everyone to see the work. This is where I’m heading with online teaching — open courses. Learning should be open — if it is, people will be less afraid to try out their ideas, absorb and respond to criticism. They will also be part of a larger community. That’s how the web works, and these are important skills for my students’ careers. But much of this approach could be seen under the formal rules as FERPA violations, so do I dare open things up?

Then it occurred to me: perhaps using outside websites gets around some FERPA foolishness.

Image cc by h.koppdelaney at Flickr

If I am using a college-supported LMS, clearly it could be argued that the entire course is a record maintained by the institution, especially if we are archiving whole classes. In fact, that seems to make an online class more FERPA-protected than an on-site class, since for an on-site class the instructors alone maintain all records except the final grade, in piles of gradebooks and old assignments in their office. FERPA has been around a long time, yet no one has ever asked me about the records I maintain for on-site classes. But an online class is stored, the whole thing, often by the institution.

So here’s the cool thing. If we are having students use Blogger and are commenting on their posts, for example, how can it be claimed that it is “maintained” by the institution? I can see the privacy violations, of course, that many try to solve by allowing students to use aliases, but I can’t help but wonder whether using outside technologies don’t actually protect us from FERPA violations!

In my totally non-legally trained fly-by-night interpretation of FERPA, the only thing that needs to be behind a wall is the gradebook. Engrade (or a pay-to-play online gradebook) can do that, so no problem. Obviously this is not the first time I’ve posted on the issue of why bother with an LMS (must be something about April!). But in seeing those interactive websites we love as not only a place to learn but a place where the very lack of institutional control might be a benefit to us and our institutions, I think I’m making strides here.

Why, yes, I am a model

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

Profs have a habit of asking students “do this, do that” but not modeling that doing at all.

We say “write an essay” or “create a thesis”. Then we tell them how to do it, with lengthy instructions, written and verbal. Often it isn’t till I get to “construct an analytical theme, everyone” that anyone says, “Lisa, could you do one for us? show us what one looks like?”

I’m more careful to model now, having thought about this for several years. It’s easy in an on-site class. These days I occasionally sit at the overhead projector, modeling how to gloss a document or construct a thesis, with the students helping me. Online classes are a bit different, since my discussions aren’t synchronous.

In my online discussion forums, which I’ve changed to an exercise where they construct a collection of sources and then construct a thesis, I have begun modeling as part of my mid-week post for the first time. I ask everyone to use three of the sources their colleagues have posted at the beginning of the week, and create a historical thesis, using those sources as support. But instead of just pointing to my tutorial on creating a historical thesis (I do that too), I also say something like:

Here’s an example. I’m looking at my quotation from Rousseau’s Emile, the painting posted by Abegail (I’d cite the title if I knew it!), and Jardins de la Reine posted by Sarah P, and I create this thesis:

“Middle-class society in the 18th century seemed concerned for the environment and education of children.”
1. Rousseau’s Emile shows an educational philosophy based on the child’s interests.
2. The painting posted by Abegail shows healthy, well-tended children as part of a family portrait.
3. Jardins de la Reine shows children having fun in the outdoors.

I’ve done this in each class for the first several weeks, using three sources that they’ve posted. It’s helped, I think. The theses I’m getting are much more thought out and interesting than in the pasts.

Yes, indeed, modeling is a good career.

Ramblings on assessments that work and assumptions that don’t

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments

At this time of the semester, I am grading Participation Assessments. I do this twice each semester, asking the students to evaluate their own participation in the course as compared to a rubric.

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At the end of the first eight weeks, when they do this for the first time, there are often revelations. Students are grateful I gave the assignment, because now they know they aren’t meeting expectations. Many promise to do better.

I learn from this that the assessment is important, because it makes them look at the Grading Policies page, where the rubric is. That page has been “required” reading since the beginning of the class. There were questions from it on the Tech Check/Syllabus Quiz, which is the first thing due in the class. And yet most have forgotten it, or never read it, or didn’t think it applied to them, etc. till the assessment.

What’s remarkable is that occasionally, the assessment at the end of the year also prompts discovery, or in this case, makes me aware there hasn’t been any.

My ending Participation Assessment says:

After carefully examining the grading rubric, your logs, and forum posts for the second half of the semester, consider in what ways have you improved or reduced your participation from the half-way point. Please briefly explain:
1. how may points you received on the first Participation Assessment,
2. how many you think you should have for this half, and
3. why.

One student wrote:

“I’ve actually probably participated less since the class begun. I just try to learn the information that is presented along with information in my book and take the tests and get the best grade possible. I’ve always not really understood the class discussions, since i can usually do the test with out them and i am really busy. I don’t think i should get to many points in the participation section! I’ll try to get by and do my with the tests.”

This student didn’t have a single discussion post since the first evaluation, and seemed unaware that the discussions aren’t just chatting — they constitute the bulk of writing for the class. I tell them this, of course, but I say it in the forums! And there’s no evidence here that he looked at the rubric at all.

I figure the Grading Policies page isn’t the only page not being seen by some. I know by looking at logs that many skip the Study Guides (and therefore don’t realize they contain all the multiple choice questions that will be on the forthcoming quiz). Or they don’t bother with the lecture. They read the book, and take the tests.

In terms of course design, I don’t consider the discussion 20% of the course, just 20% of the grade. It’s more like half the class, because it’s the processing and sharing of the knowledge learned via presentation and reading. It’s the heart, not a side activity. It’s lower stakes (not 50% of the grade)  because I want the students to feel free to explore. I assume they’re looking at the grading, and figuring where to spend their time for maximum grade impact. But I see increasingly that they don’t do that.

Rather, they make assumptions:

  • Anything called a test or quiz is important.
  • Anything called discussion you can miss.
  • The textbook is the heart of the class and should be read carefully.
  • Anything called an assessment could go one way or another.
  • If it’s online, it’s self-paced and you don’t need to “show up”.
  • All online classes are in Blackboard.

They have to discover that it’s not that way, but to discover one has to explore. As I see all these wonderful ideas to get students to explore (using collaborative or connectivist methods) they have to actually peruse the class website, understand the rules and the process. My class isn’t that much different from a traditional class, yet I have a very non-traditional element in the way I use discussion and participation assessments (where they get to assess their own learning). If students can’t even accept this, what chance do more radical methods have?

I know, I have heard that one has to throw out the whole thing (university, grading, teacher-directed anything) for it to work. But I refuse to believe this. If I do that, I will spend the entire class with teacher-directed instruction on how to do the class! Once I created an (on-site) honors section where all we did was write one research paper, meeting an hour a week throughout the semester. Just one paper. Instead of talking history and ideas during our hour-long sessions, I ended up having to instruct them on how to write a paper. Even with a list to guide them, they did not know how to do basic college English 101 things, like make an outline, do basic research, develop a thesis. Of the 12 who started the section, only 3 finished. Their assumption? That I would lecture on history for the 16 hours, and they’d memorize it. My radical method was great for 3 students. That doesn’t hack it in my job.

This means that designing an online class is not just an exercise in transferring pedagogy, or plugging things in. It is an awareness that the exact same difficulties that haunt us in on-site classes are not magically solved online. These challenges include students not attending class, not reading the syllabus, not understanding when they ask a question and it is answered, not asking questions when they need to, missing tests, having low reading ability, being inexperienced at processing basic information, and not being aware of cues given to help them.

Sometimes we focus so hard on the “online” aspect of the class that we forget these problems exist, or think they are replaced by scary tech problems instead. The scary tech problem comes down to one: if the only way the student will understand what’s necessary is to be talked to into his face, then he will not understand. If he couldn’t understand anyway, no matter how many different ways it’s explained, then that’s the way it is. Whether it’s online or on-site, all we can do is provide resources and repeatedly remind the students that those resources (the instructor, the rules posted or handed out, the entire internet, that site or handout about plagiarism) are there for them.  We can try to counter assumptions, but we cannot eliminate all obstacles.

My Own Learning: Tailoring Discussion

Lisa M Lane

Last week, I learned about evidence collection and perspective by watching the discussions in two online sections of the same class, modern U.S. history.

Hester Street 1903The reading assignment and lecture were balanced between immigration from Europe at the turn of the last century, and the expansion of the giants of industry and commercialism, including cultural aspects like automobiles and Tin Pan Alley. The prompt was an image of crowded Hester Street, which I figured combined both the immigration and commercialism of the era.

One class gathered evidence almost exclusively related to Ellis Island and the plight of the immigrants. The assigned documents and issues about commerce and industry were basically ignored. The result will be many theses about immigration, so I asked them to expand their thesis to include previous units, figuring I might as well hear about the exploitation of freed slaves and Native Americans all together, since their conversation was already headed that way.

The other class (again, this is two sections of the same class — they cannot see each other’s work) created a very different collection: everything from product advertisements to racist sheet music covers to Jewish workers’ leagues to the poem on the Statue of Liberty. As a result, I’ve asked them not only to create a thesis using their choice of evidence, but to comment on the collection as a whole.

So this “freer” way, the making of a collection of sources, opens the gate to discussing how the items collected by their colleagues affects what they decide to post. When you see everyone posting photos of immigrants, what is the tendency? It seems to be posting a YouTube video of the immigrants. When you see people posting a variety of sources, perhaps you look for something different to add.

It gives much for me to think about in terms of more open pedagogy and how historians work.