I have here a voice file of an interview I conducted with my guest speaker, Dr. E Marcia Johnson, Her PhD is in educational technology from the University of Toronto and she has taught applied linguistics in Japan and New Zealand. Her current research includes eLearning across academic disciplines at tertiary level, and technology implementation in language teaching... (and in fact, more than 10 years ago I was one of her students in a paper on Computer Assisted Language Learning... which I thoroughly enjoyed).
In the sound file below Marcia talks about the reasons that students enroll in distance papers, and how the same reasons that they choose to take a net paper can impact on their ability to participate.
I invite you to listen to the sound file and reflect in the comment box on your experiences in this area. Perhaps you have been a student in an online paper, and it proved more difficult to keep up than you anticipated.
Marcia Johnson, BA Toronto, MA (Educational
Technology, PhD (Ed. Tech) Toronto.
Relaxing in the garden
Technology, PhD (Ed. Tech) Toronto.
Relaxing in the garden
Marcia mentions some mechanisms that she would set in place to address some of these issues.
I am interested in your opinion or insights as to what you do to simulate the participation behaviours that we tacitly expect within a face to face classroom. I'd love to read some of your ideas.
Marcia will also be participating in this discussion, so please feel free to address your comments to her too.
Sound file (5MB) (File may take a little while to load)
Streaming link to the file (takes about a minute to load with medium speed broadband)
or... Download link to the file
18 comments:
Hello Katherine and Marcia
Thank you very much for starting the ball rolling with this important topic of how we retain and engage students in online courses.
As an online teacher, this is soemthing I angst about all the time. The strategies I use is:
1. frequent feedback as we go along, so the student knows how he/she is going;
2. keep in touch with student on a one-to-one basis to help keep motivation levels up;
3. design the course so it is activity-driven...there's nothing more off-putting than an online course that has nothing but readings
4. embed assessment as the course onfolds to keep student on track.
Any other suggestions?
Katherine: just picked this post up on my Google Reader. Are you planning on advertising this event to the FO2010 email group?
Wow, Sarah and Pam, thanks so much for starting off this discussion, and with such thought-provoking comments too. I'd like to engage with each ... so
@Sarah, first posting... love your points 1 - 4, and am remembering how motivating I found these about your facilitation while a student in your course. Would you mind commenting on managing your workload with this kind of commitment? Regarding your points 3, I'd like to invite more discussion around the area of technical expertise.
How much might a lack of technical expertise on the part of the facilitator contribute to student participation.
How much technical expertise does an online facilitator need to have, ... how do they get and who might provide the professional development to help facilitators manage the technology.
Agree totally with your point #4. ... is there anything we should think about regarding assessment in an online course? (I know that the students I see are v. strategic when it comes to assessment!).
@ Pam
I found your posting most interesting, and have been thinking for sometime to what extent the students can take responsibility for the participation of other students in the course, and how that might be facilitated by the course leader... but, in saying that, would that be appropriate. I wonder if this is part of the area that Marcia mentioned when she stated that she makes her expectations very explicit... and part of those expectations might be about structuring into the course regular assessed participation. I know that there are teachers who might comment about that, and I think of the recent thesis of Dr. Nicola Westberry, (who I mentioned in an earlier posting during this course) who observed that lurking is participation in it's own right. ... I must confess though, to having in some courses been the "lurking student" that others find so frustrating. ... I knew that my postings were frequently overly strong, and sometimes inappropriate, and it worried me... so I tended to not post without a lot of forethought and care, which took me too long and I'd miss the window ... excuses I know, but that's how it happened. What would you do with such a student?
@ Sarah, second posting... I would like to advertise this event via the FO2010 email group, but I'm not sure how to ... can you explain briefly what I should do?
You asked about workload. I think a lot of workload issues are solved for good planning and course design. You have to look at time differently than when you are teaching F2F. I might have to put 2 hours by for a F2F lecture. But online, that 2 hours might be used up over a few days. It does call for flexibility and a different mind-set. I don't think you can think like a F2F teacher in the online environment.
The other thing I do to manage workload is use a number of tools to monitor students' work like RSS feeds so I know when they have submitted work etc.
As for technical expertise, I think an online facilitator has to be confident in their use of tools so they can support the less confident and competent student. I think it helps that the facilitator understands technology so they can work with students to find the technology that best suits them.
Interesting conversation. I have observed, as a student and as a teacher that there are so called “lurkers” in face to face learning as well as on-line. Thinking about the tutorials I’ve attended in the past there have been those that are quite verbal and others who add very little to conversations but quietly process information but still develop their learning. For me the difference is that in a face-to-face situation it is much easier for the teacher to observe, through non verbal cues, who needs extra encouragement or motivation and those that are in danger of dropping-out. I have seen a number of different methods used to encourage participation but the main one is assessment, students are more inclined to complete tasks if there are marks or certification available. However, a vibrant environment for community and conversation can develop in asynchronous or synchronous forums if expectations are clear, tasks well planned and instructions explicit. Also, the regular and positive feedback Sarah provided when facilitating FO2010 is a good example of encouraging communication and socialisation and this was enhanced by her ability to introduce different applications available. I also think many “lurkers” feel more comfortable, especially initially, if there is a private place for them to meet with the tutor because this allows them to gain the confidence to participate with their peers.
Hi prs,
Yay, great conversation so far!
These 'lurkers' are a dilemma aren't they? As Pam mentioned above, her ability to participate fully and meaningfully in her course was hampered by other students' reluctance to do so, yet, students who 'lurk' have their reasons for doing so, the validity of which I feel uncomfortable challenging. Marcia may have some insights here on how she would 'train' students to participate, even if it may push participants a little outside their natural comfort zones.
This idea of structuring participation into the assessment is a strategy emerging in this discussion.
My questions around this that I have are:
How much assessment is needed to get the type of engagement with the content that a faciliator would be looking for?
...and
How to avoid the course becoming over assessed?
I saw assessed participation done reasonably successfully in a teacher-training course for English language teachers living and working in Vladivostok, facilitated via the university LMS in NZ. This worked out to be a fair indicator of each participant's competence to engage with the content. Something to beware, maybe, is a student wanting to question the grade he or she receives for contributions.
If anyone out there has a set of descriptors that they use for measuring participation for assessment purposes, please (please) post them. It's such a difficult thing to manage. Perhaps we could start devising a set of descriptors here?
Everybody:
Feel free to dive in and join the debate. What have your experiences been with assessed participation?
Thank you Katherine, Marcia, Sarah, Pam and prs
Thanks for your contributions but I am not going to demonstrate here that I have listened to and understood your meaning. Critical thinking takes time and discipline. Is this an engaging behaviour? Sharing my thinking about it my be
I think designing authentic assessment tasks that require the behaviours you want to see is important. I believe that assessment is the most powerful influence on participants behaviour. "Assessment is the single most powerful influence on learning in formal courses ..." (Boud 2001. p67)
David Boud describes 40 different strategies for assessment tasks grouped into 8 areas
1. Engaging students
2. Authentic activities
3. Students design assessments
4. Integrative tasks
5. Learning and judgement
6. Modelling and practice
7. Working with peers
8. Giving and receiving feedback
http://www.iml.uts.edu.au/assessment-futures/elements/
It could also be helpful (especially when assessment doesn't apply) to spell out the range of activities that demonstrate engagement and their implications so that participates can freely choose the level of participation they are ready for and the implications. An authentic, tantalising challenge can then be offered to invite participants to self manage their participation and engagement behaviours towards a stretch goal.
Some levels of participation could be
- read other people's contributions and let no one know
- make your own contributions
- make comments about other people's contributions and how it has influenced your own thinking
- share the assumptions and reasoning behind your own thinking
- invite other people to respond to your own thinking
- ??? what other levels and ways of participating could be added here to create a continuum of choices?
How could we design fun, engaging and relevant assessment activities that deliver value that is attractive to participants?
Hi Everyone,
Good to read all your comments. I was hoping to post last night but unfortunately was distracted by other writing.
First - thanks to Katherine for inviting me to contribute to this course; it was a real pleasure to participate.
Also, nice to see reference made to Nicky Westberry's thesis, which I think is an extremely important piece of academic work. I'm basking a bit in Nicky's glory here as I was the Chief Supervisor of her doctorate and was extremely impressed to read her depth of insight into eLearning issues.
Now to add a couple of reflections: Student commitment (Pam). Yes absolutely. Not sure why students would think that online learning is easier – maybe the lack of a teacher looking over their shoulder!! ;-)
The idea of "lurking": I built compulsory participation into my assessments. It might seem a bit draconian to make participation compulsory, but it worked! However I always "rewarded" everyone with a mark, even if it was a small contribution to the overall grade. It helped students understand the value of their contributions. The issue was then how many marks to assign for participation and how is participation assessed as being "excellent" or "good". Gradually I became more proficient at this and used broad descriptors, which avoided a “good” or “not so good” way of thinking about participating in discussions.
I’ll end here with assessment because it’s also where Mark left off. Let’s see what other comments are posted!!
In reference to Dr Westberry's thesis, for those of you interested in this subject, the abstract can be read at Nicky's thesis. Very interesting!
(I thought I had made reference to Nicky's work in an earlier blog, but in fact I was thinking of another PhD ... Dr. Elaine Khoo).
What I have found most poignant about Mark's posting is his comment that "critical thinking takes time and discipline". That's just the thing innit... being a slower thinker myself, how could I forget that?... Our 'hurry-hurry' 'rush-it-through' education doesn't allow (for some of us at least) the space to really get to grips with the themes. Thank you Mark for that reminder.
What to do!?
I also am really appreciating Mark's list of "levels of participation" which have helped me make more concrete in my mind what it is that I might be looking for. That is what this discussion is for... the practicalities of successful facilitation (whatever that is... another thread if someone would like to pick that up). Most valuable!
Hello! I'm not a teacher, so I’ll just reflect a bit of my personal experience. I am currently a uni student doing a full time distance degree: a blend of audio conference, intensives, detailed paper-based course material (old-fashioned no way round it make a cup of tea and get reading), and an on-line component to some papers.
So far, the on line component has meant compulsory contributions to a discussion kicked off by the lecturer. The contributions form part of the final grade, but marking has been very easy: if you make any kind of cogent contribution to all the required discussions, you get full marks. However, I've noticed that even with such a simple formula, many students simply do not engage on-line. To me, it's like sitting a piano exam having worked on the pieces but not bothered to learn the scales; I'm bewildered by that, and I imagine the lecturers must be, too.
I have found the overall quality of contributions, in my opinion, quite poor. Even the students who are organised enough to contribute for the sake of their grades don't bother to read what's already been said, so there is a lot of repetition of ideas, and seldom anything novel or thought-provoking. I try to be the first to post a response to the lecturers statement or question, so as to appear original. All the subsequent posts will say much the same thing. I agree very much with Pam, who has already posted on the frustration of other students who don’t meet the tutor (or other students) half way.
A colleague of mine did a paper in which there was a pairing: one student allocated to critique the posting of a specific other. Sounds good, but was a disappointing experience for my colleague. He posted, the student critiqued, he then countered that post with a further contribution and the other student should have been engaged enough to remain in that debate. But the other student had met the requirements of the paper, and didn't bother to respond. In a subject like pastoral theology, as this one was, discussion is quite personal and can be emotive, so it leaves a student high and dry to have extended a discussion, and been ignored.
I am surprised by the fairly high proportion of students who struggle to express themselves in written English. It makes it a dispiriting exercise for me trying to find a way to engage with other students on-line when their ideas are so badly hampered by the language medium. That’s not exclusive to on-line environments, of course: it makes audio-conferences difficult too. I realise some of the followers of this blog have a special interest in academic English; I can only wonder what lecturers are being given to read when the essays are submitted.
My tuppence worth… keep the change!
Ellen
Hi,
I have been an online student and a lecturer with an online unit so will put my thoughts down on both sides. As a student, I am very enthusiastic and like to read and comment frequently. The FO2010 and my Masters in Midwifery were 2 online courses that I found very stimulating and in which I did not encounter any issues with students not engaging ( or at least it seemed that way from my point of view as there were enough people commenting and providing thought provoking answers). I found the students very articulate and I thoroughly enjoyed my learning. I also found the lecturers posted occasionally either to generate further discussion or to clarify a point which allowed the students room to learn with out being stiffled. Occasionally a misinterpretation of the literature was corrected but done so in a positive and professional way. A question that springs to mind - Do you think there is more of a problem with online engagement from undergraduate students than from post graduate students? (as personally I haven't had any issues as a student with post graduate studies)
As for my lecturing experiences - I had received no online training and was asked to conduct a partial online unit. With only my clinical knowledge to guide me, I somehow muffled my way through it but left feeling that my inability to set the right online assessment tasks and discussion questions, greatly influenced my students level of engagment. I noticed Ellen talked about students repeating what others had said and maybe this was because the questions posed did not have enough 'meat' in them to develop the discussion. I found this occurred in my discussion board - I was too simplistic and quickly cottoned on that I needed to improve things drastically if I was to effectively engage my students. I got help (Grad cert. in Higher Ed), did some online courses and watched what other lecturers did so I could improve. It was a steep learning curve but one I have thoroughly enjoyed.
Some great comments in here, and 'Well Done' to Brownie for putting it together. Just trowing in this link as current work issues and what has been commented on here has got me thinking about our job as on-line facilitators. I kinda feel that many tutors/lecturers/teachers also may feel that the on-line environment does not require great input from them, when the opposite may well be true, especially to new entrants and the disorganised (such as myself)
http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/facilitation.pdf
(The posting above is not really deleted, it's just this one... I hadn't read my comments properly and there were awful errors... so here it is)
As I look back over the postings I've made throughout the FO2010 course, and then read the development of this discussion (as it has morphed from managing expectations through to issues of managing participation), I can see how equivocal I have been; my conflict being between allowing a student to set his or her own level of participation, and the way that this can impact on the experience of other students in the course. Ellen and Gillian's posts both really caused me to pause and wonder about my expectations, what is it reasonable for me to expect from students, and whether I can reasonably expect students to feel responsibility towards the experience of other students in the course... (indeed?, what should the facilitator of the course of Ellen's colleague done, when his attempt to engage meaningfully was left dangling?) I wonder if we have expectations that students know how to engage, when in fact in society there are many of us who don't have effective conversation skills, so why should it be any different in our courses.
So, in a most serendipitously timely way, yesterday I had the opportunity to go to a talk by Dr. Ruie Pritchard from North Carolina State University, who is in the process of conducting a comparative study looking at interaction patterns of peer reviewers on writing in face-to-face versus online environments. It's a fascinating (if preliminary) study, but what struck me most as Dr. Pritchard spoke were two things. 1) How very emotionally connected a writer becomes with his or her writing; the difficulty that students have to disassociate themselves from their writing. They tend to see feedback as personal, rather than directed at the writing only... we need to be aware of this defensive instinct as teachers... and have strategies in place to help students 'let go' a little... which leads to my next point...
2) The degree of training that went into preparing the students to interact effectively in both contexts. The facilitators outlined the 'rules of engagement', they role-played, they practised, and practised, and practised again, before the interaction proper began. To listen to Dr. Pritchard describe that process, and then see her data taken from the subsequent interactions was most eye-opening. Although they knew how they were supposed to interact (they'd been trained!), they often chose to disregard the established concensus and engage out of turn.
Certainly compelling for me as a facilitator, and I have taken lots of notes. I have to agree with Gillian's conclusion (and Davin's too, inversely) that the degree of successful student participation in an online course depends on a number of facilitation factors, primarily the careful and thoughtful and thorough planning of the interaction, the subtle involvement of the facilitator too, (not too much or too little), but (as Marcia implied) sometimes it will depend on the nature of a particular student cohort.
Hi Everyone,
Yes - great discussion and lots of stimulating ideas. Thanks for inviting me to participate and thanks to everyone who contributed. It's been fun!!!
Best regards, Marcia
To wrap up
This has been a delightful discussion and I have enjoyed reading the perspectives of both colleague facilitators and fellow students.
I found most helpful Sarah's strategies for managing workload, and Sarah's, PRS, and Mark's insights on the mechanics of facilitating participation are very useful. From there the conversation turned more exclusively towards issues of participation, and it was with much interest that we read Pam, Ellen and Jillian's postings on their sense of disappointment and frustration when participating in courses as online students. As well as this, Davin's concerns about the technological expertise of facilitators has provided me with very much to think about.
Thanks again to Marcia, for providing us with the stimulus for this essential discussion.
What a discussion. The standard of the comments relating to the interview was very high I thought and I got a lot out of it. Like most things there's no right answers but I can see we have to mix in students range of responses with some good planning and practice. I think these issues have always been with is in the face-to-face area but seem more pointed and dislocating in an on-line environment. Great blog, thanks.
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