Category: Discussion

Discussion Goodness

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

So much cool stuff is going on right now in my asynchronous discussions, I simply must report! If you follow me, you know I worked this summer to redesign my discussions because I was not pleased with them: they were too text heavy, didn’t allow enough student independence, and didn’t emphasize practice in creating a historical thesis.

Discussion Design

What I’m doing is emphasizing the collection of primary sources during the first part of the week, then the construction of a thesis based on those sources, plus critique and summary at the end of the week.

I start with a visual prompt and instructions that tell them they should respond to it with either a comment or their own piece of evidence. I have linked to the FAQ that has instructions on how to insert an image, video or audio clip into the forum. They need to connect their source to the unit, and post their source between Sunday (the start of our week) and Wednesday midnight.

On Thursday I come in, and create a “Take discussion from here, please” post that presents the best theses from the previous week, mentions the evidence they’ve presented, and creates tasks for the last part of the week, depending on what day they happen to sign in:

This is working very well — my History of England class created a first week’s forum that looked like the art gallery I had tried to get them to create when I used the glossary:

http://lisahistory.net/media/britforum.mov

And the result is the creation of theses based on the evidence they have submitted, a little critique and revision, and a summary of the week’s discussion for those who like to come at the end anyway.

An Occasional Survey

I am also using a quick survey occasionally to check something. For example, I asked about the contribution of Roman culture to English history:

My interpretation in lecture was that Roman occupation had contributed only things that were not long-lasting; this let me know how the students interpreted the unit.

Emoticonism

I normally only use smiley faces and winks as emoticons in communicating with students. But last week, I had asked a couple of students to please go back to their evidence and cite it so we could see where it came from. They didn’t. I thought maybe it was not obvious in my post that I wanted them to — maybe they didn’t see it.

So I’m going to start using emoticons as symbols when I comment. Instead of writing “NOTE” or using bold or red text to highlight, I use a “thoughtful” emoticon:

Catches the eye, I think.

Because I *really* don’t know where they’re coming from

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

This post is more technical and cognitive adjustment than social commentary, because this time I am literally concerned with where the students are coming from, as they follow links around my class.

I am reworking my forum dicussions in U.S. history, so as to better emphasize one of our Student Learning Outcomes: the development of a historical thesis. At the same time, I am trying to encourage them to post the sources they find, to emphasize discovery over just studying the resources I’ve given them, as I said I would do in my May 28 post.

As I work, I am posting my sources and linking them, as I want them to do also. Since I’m asking them to refer back to other information, I am also linking to those items. For example, I post a cartoon that is in their documents workbook. Since the class is fully online, the documents are available in a couple of places: as a link to a full workbook pdf they can print (on the course information page), and as anchored links for each document from inside the lectures (linked from assignment).

But I have noticed that when I mention the documents in discussion (the ones linked in these other places) and students discuss, they sometimes haven’t seen them. This happens on tests too. I get answers like, “I didn’t know where to find this cartoon”.

It just occurred to me that despite my well thought-out and multiply-posted instructions, they are not necessarily seeing all the material. This means they are not following links from lecture to source, as I intended. They might be printing the workbook (or not) then ignoring it, or not following the lecture links. So when a document comes up in discussion or on a test, they haven’t seen it.

When they come to discussion, then, I literally don’t know where they’re coming from. They may have read the text, the lecture, the document, or none of these. So at the risk (which I take all the time) of enabling bad work habits, I am now linking to the document inside the workbook when I post any item from it. I used Gliffy to try to visualize this:

Yes, this makes it possible for them to just get into the discussion before they’ve read anything, and open the document we’re talking about right there. Naturally, this is not what I want — I want them to have seen it first. But since they don’t necessarily do that…

Good thing that might happen: those who didn’t do the reading will at least know one source per week through discussion, plus the ones they post themselves. And my link will bring them back to the workbook, where they might discover the other assigned documents. Worth a try, no?

Upgrading Discussion

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

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:

http://lisahistory.net/media/discussionelluminate5.mov

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.

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….

Overview of Participation

Lisa M Lane

Moodle does not let you see everyone’s forum participation all at once, unless you select only one forum. I have a forum for each week in each class, and ask the students to assess their own participation. Not that I don’t trust them, and of course I know who’s there a lot by reading their posts, but I like some stats to peruse while I assess their assessments.

Today I let Moodle’s download feature help me. Although I cannot get Moodle to sort by name when I ask for a report of all participations on all days, even limiting it to Add (to show only what they’ve contributed), it will do it when I download, in this case to Excel.

Then I can sort the entire chart by their name (Column D) and see easily whether they’ve posted the required number of times at the frequency I’ve requested.

Trying Something Less Controlling

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments

Just tonight, frantic that I hadn’t gone in yet to do all the discussion summaries I began doing over a year ago, it occurred to me that the students should do them.

I have been modeling and demonstrating (which is my job, I learned from Stephen Downes’ paper of 2006 in the crazy class I’m taking) for six weeks. Every week I’ve summarized the discussion, citing the students’ posts, noting their contributions, and suggesting leading analytical questions based on what they discussed (and didn’t discuss).

So tonight in the two classes which have the most active, intellectual, creative forum posts, I wrote instead:

We have several excellent threads, or topics, going here.

For the last several weeks, I have come in and summarized at this point, then presented some further leading questions.

This week, I’d like to have you do that.

Choose one topic/thread, and summarize that thread only (if the thread you want has been taken already, reply to that person’s post to add your input — please don’t repeat information). Use quotations and cite each other’s posts, as well as your sources from the class as needed. See whether we can develop a thesis (a statement with a point of view) for each topic area.

This is a really good class and I think you can do it! 🙂

Something feels really right about this, though of course I can’t predict whether it will work. I have been seeking places in these classes where I can turn more control over to the students. I have not had the opportunity to provide as many different options for earning points as I would like, and this technique would make it necessary for students to read the work of their colleagues and comment, rather like a blog, instead of just responding to my prompt. We’ll see how it goes…

Multiple intelligences and online participation

Lisa M Lane

For their first discussion forum of the semester, I ask students to participate in a Multiple Intelligences Survey, and post their results as they introduce themselves. Last year I thought about tracking things a bit. Instead I filed it away in my brain, and now I’m seeing things more clearly.

I went into discussion for my four online classes today. In classes where there is a high percentage of math/logic learners, the entries are short and stilted. Many do not really introduce themselves or respond to other students. In classes where the language and social learners dominate, a real conversation and connections have already begun. There are responses to individuals and friendships forming.

I do not think that it is necessary to BE a language or social learner to be successful in an online class, and I’ve told them that. But I think it’s helpful to everyone to have so many of them in the class. It gives a completely different feel to the class, and I’ve noticed this the past few semesters. I suspect retention will be higher. I really need to keep some numbers on this, but . . . I’m not a math learner.

Creating their own community

Lisa M Lane

I’ve read a lot about how to create online community. I’m not so good at it. In my own work, I join a lot of groups and can’t keep up with them all. Too many feeds, too many people. I confess, I get a little lost!

But I’m supposed to do it with my students, help them form a community in my class. I’ve read all the articles, all the research. If they feel they are part of a community, they’ll stick around. They won’t drop the class. I’ve been successful in developing good discussion forums, but sometimes even those don’t work. Only rarely do my students meaningfully connect to each other in online discussion. Well, so far as I know!

I teach a class each semester on-site, at the San Elijo campus of MiraCosta. Used to be I’d post the syllabus and information in Blackboard. Once I tried to link the class directly into the online version of the same course, but they didn’t come to class then and got behind. As a new thing this semester, I opened a Moodle site where I posted all the homework, and my lecture notes, and their grades, etc. Like Blackboard, Moodle has a Message feature. Unlike Blackboard, the feature is very easy to use.

So one day earlier this semester, a student Messaged me to say she couldn’t find something in her Grades. In order to submit the assignment she was doing, I had to log in as her (a handy Moodle feature). When I did so, a bunch of Message windows opened up. Of course I didn’t read them, but it became immediately apparent that a group in the class was using Messages to communicate. A fairly large group, of 7-10 students. They were using it a lot. Once I knew, I noticed it in the classroom. Not all were great students. But they were obviously studying together.

The thing is, I didn’t ask them to do this. I didn’t create their “network”. I didn’t even tell them Messages was available for their use. I just gave them access to the system. They created the use that worked for them, and they used it the way they wanted to. Two of them had crises during the semester, and one of the others helped out the person in trouble with notes and messages. None of them dropped the class. All of them are taking the final exam this week.

The moral? I’m not sure. Maybe they’re linking up online more than I know. They are creating support systems unrelated to the college or to my class, or to anything I do. That’s good, surely. I don’t need to control it. But I sure would like to encourage it!

Discussion “Triggers”

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

I found it — the blog post from eLearning Connection that began my use of multimedia triggers for online discussions. I have just finished finding and adding in all the triggers (teasers? prompts? I’ve been calling them “ticklers”, which is more seductive) for my fall classes. These include:

An actor playing a Saxon upset at the Norman invasion, from the National Archives Learning Curve.


A QTRV of Canterbury Cathedral

An animation of throwing things while stationary and in motion from UNSW Physclips, Australia

<— This painting

Animations of the Western Front from the BBC


A video of the Sioux Ghost Dance performed for Buffalo Bill’s show from the Library of Congress

This photo —–>

A 1950s fashion show

And this video of a computer game recreation of the Battle of Agincourt:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH1xp0-32pI]

Should be interesting discussions this semester!

Ed-Media

Lisa M Lane

I have attended over a dozen sessions, and overall what I’m getting is that educators and technologists are excited by the opportunities and challenges of using the web to enhance learning experiences at all levels.edmedia.jpgThe opportunities are for collaboration (in small groups and globally), the creation of new knowledge, access to and participation in scholarship, and interactivity. Challenges include the widening of the gap between rich and poor, bad design, uncontrolled and vastly expanding information (much of which has dubious value), marketing interests, and security fears.

Some “take away” notes as I think about the sessions (names linked to conference abstract):

  • Providing specific instructions and a rubric grading elements such as relevance, originality, and writing quality improve online discussion participation quantity and quality. (Karen Swan, Kent State Univ)
  • Using a blog linked inside Blackboard can replace both Announcements and the lousy discussion forums, but is still instructor-controlled. (Raymond Kimball, US Military Academy at West Point)
  • A student project where sound was captured in neighborhoods and then linked to Google maps created high interest but not much analysis among students. (Claudia Engel, Stanford University)
  • We know what works for teaching: authentic tasks, problem-based learning, collaborative construction of knowledge, construction of presentation. What doesn’t work is talking heads, isolated learners and low-level outcomes. (Thomas Reeves, University of Georgia)
  • New online instructors need help with knowing how to adjust instruction, guide and motivate students online, manage their time, choose appropriate technologies, perceive online student personalities, and model the effective use of technology. (Brian Newberry, CSUSB)
  • When assessed on content acquisition, students prefer a standard web page of information to an inquiry-based “conversational agent”. (Bob Heller, Athabasca University)
  • A good first day of class activity is a scavenger hunt in groups for information from the course website. (Teresa Adams, Georgia Perimeter College)
  • E-Portfolios can be created in different kinds of software and used for keeping track of artifacts over a long period, for assessment and retrieval. (Joan Hanor, CSUSM and Jean Haefner, University of Wisconsin)
  • During a collaboration project between American and Danish students, cultural differences caused both learning and challenges. American students tended to base discussion on personal experience, be task-oriented, divide work according to who already knew the topic, and work fewer hours. Danish students based discussion on the assigned materials, focused on process, divided the work according to who needed to learn a topic, and worked more hours. (Ana-Paula Correira, Iowa State University)
  • Language students organized themselves into self-help groups to work on a course, having been provided with an audioconferencing tool. (John Pettit, Open University)
  • Second Life is not the only virtual world, but it has a huge group of educational participants. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas; Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University; Ulrich Rauch, University of British Columbia; Cyprien Lomas, The University of British Columbia)
  • Course Management Systems (now called Learning Management Systems) are cumbersome and problematic, especially when it comes to usability and transportability of content for both instructors and learners. What’s needed is smarter systems, ways to share materials, better integration, and pedagogical scaffolding (including ways to do remediation). Students still can’t create anything inside an LMS. (Patricia McGee, University of Texas, and Colleen Carmean, Arizona State University)

A Better Discussion

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments

I have been applying a technique to online discussion this semester that I have been very happy with, and I’ve been telling people about it. Discussion has been for a long time the unhappy weak spot in all my classes. I would create a discussion conference (Blackboard) or forum (Moodle) each week, with either questions to discuss or topics to work with. I tried to post a variety of topics so that the students would have options and would be able to discuss, rather than just post the same answer over and over. I required two posts per week, the first post by Wednesday midnight, and a second post replying to another student, by Sunday midnight.

In Blackboard, the limited threaded format caused serious boredom on my part. Every discussion every week in every class looked the same, my conference followed by nested links. I either had to click on each one to follow the topics, or “collect” them to read them all, but even sorting by date I couldn’t see who was replying to whom and it was all text and …. boring, boring, difficult and boring. So I wouldn’t go in that much because with forty students per class it was overwhelming, so I didn’t catch all the arguments and flaming, and when I went in to post myself to lead the discussion in a different direction, my own posts mixed in with all the others and were ignored, even when I started using an asterisk in the subject line so they would see it was me. Yuck. Partcipation would decline, and they weren’t really talking to each other anyway.

So I did some research. I read Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, Robert Tinker (Atwood Publishing 2000). The book had lots of great ideas, as you can see in my summary. I chose the role of “Leader of a Group Process” and posted a “tickler” on a single thread for each week (an idea I got from an article).

So for the week we study The West (my guinea pigs were US history students), I found a video clip from Edison labs of Native Americans from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. They are doing the Ghost Dance. All I asked was “What issues from this unit come to mind?”

From Sunday to Wednesday, I let them answer however they wanted. I notice over the past decade a tendency for college students to emphasize the affective aspects of their existence (how they “feel” about things, rather than rational thought). For this topic, students responded with pity (or callousness) — either way they were disturbed by the clip, which is what I intended. I let them wallow in affective areas till Thursday, when I posted. I summarized what they had said, freely quoting from their own posts, then guided the discussion toward a topic of historical perception and victimization. That let them know that:

1. I had read their posts and cared about what they said

2. I was guiding the discussion in a direction based on their own comments

3. the affective concerns would now be deepened into historical analysis

Because I was in Moodle, I could see all the posts on one screen, and made mine bold text, titling it “Take discussion from here, please”. Most did, replying to my summary/guidance post.

This technique has gotten me everything I want. I only go in to each discussion a couple of times per week, I can see the whole thing in one glance, I am getting faster at creating the summary with the quotes, and the discussion is deepening to the desired level at the end of each week. Participation levels are high. I’ve decided I prefer depth in discussion to breadth, especially since I wasn’t getting breadth anyway, and early student evaluations say they are happy.

Note: One student dropped the class early on. I emailed and asked if her dropping had anything to do with my class. She wrote back saying yes, she felt I was teaching us all to pity the Indians, and she didn’t come to college for that crap. (She had only seen the first part of the discussion.) I explained to her my entire pedagogy, including the affective aspects and my goal for analysis. She changed her mind and returned, and is now helping guide the discussion. There may be a lesson here for revealing ones pedagogical goals!

Ideas for online discussion

Lisa M Lane

One of my weakest areas recently has been online discussion, and not just because Blackboard’s new discussion board is execrable. I’ve been reading up on a good method for summarizing student’s contributions and moving the conversation forward: Collison et al’s Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators (2000). I created a summary for our roundtable workshop next week.

The main idea is that the instructor’s posts are “interventions” in the discussion. They should list mini-quotations from several student posts, noting common areas, tensions, etc. in the thread. The instructor then could take on one or more roles, generating a new direction, setting up a concept for reflection, mediating a polarized discussion, or offering an alternative view. All this while trying to avoid grandstanding or hijacking the conversation. The point is to guide the students’ interaction with each other in a way that furthers class goals, answering the needs of the larger group.