{"id":2881,"date":"2014-04-15T17:44:52","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T01:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=2881"},"modified":"2014-04-15T17:44:52","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T01:44:52","slug":"whose-discussion-my-500th-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2014\/04\/whose-discussion-my-500th-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Whose discussion? (my 500th post)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

What started cropping up, though, were bits<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"disc1\"<\/p>\n

\"discfirsttopic\"<\/p>\n

In the third week or so, I posted the student-led discussion forums, with instructions like this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Grading was just rolled into the Contribution Assessment grade at mid-term and at the end of the class.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So what’s different?<\/p>\n

1. The instructions are a little more specific.
\n<\/em>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.<\/p>\n

2. The discussions are every other week in the 16-week format.<\/em>
\nThis 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.<\/p>\n

3. The Contribution Assessment happened only once.<\/em>
\nI 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.<\/p>\n

4. The students are different.<\/em>
\nLast 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}