Nancy L. Chick Associate Professor of English UWBarron County Online Discussions

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Nancy L. ChickAssociate Professor of
EnglishUW-Barron CountyOnline Discussions
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How often do you use (or will you use) online
discussions?

• Never
• Periodically
• Once a week
• Multiple times a week
• It varies

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How have you used (or will you use) online
discussions?

• As a central learning activity
• As a peripheral learning activity
• As a site for social interaction
• As a mixture of learning activity and social
  interaction
• Not at all
• Other?

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Objectives

• Introductions
• Nuts Bolts of Online Discussions
• Q A
• Higher Order Issues in Online Discussions
• Q A

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Who are you?

• Teach F2F
• Teach online
• Teach hybrid
• Thinking about teaching in the online classroom.
• Felt like sitting in a computer room on a
  beautiful spring day

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Who am I?

• Associate Professor of English
• UW-Barron County
• 3 F2F classes (composition, literature, womens
  studies, 1st-year experience)
• 1 OL literature
• class

Jack
Hazel
(Im also phone-phobic, so Jack and Hazel are
wondering what Im doing talking to this many
people on the phone!)
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Early online experience

• Wrote my own web pages using HTML code
• Course pages could be public (not password
  protected)
• Synchronous discussions (MOO suite // chatroom)
• Rewards fast typists
• Brief, superficial communication
• Quick back-and-forth

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UW Colleges Online Program

• Instructional designers create all web pages
• Password protected
• LearningSpace
• Prometheus
• Blackboard
• D2L
• Asynchronous
• Reflect upon compose thoughts
• Depth, detail
• Interaction redefined, over time

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An Investigation of the Pedagogical and Economic
Effectiveness of Sharable Content Objects, Using
Standards, in Online Instruction Academic
Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Lab Grant
sponsored by the Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) U.S. Department
of Education http//projects.aadlcolab.org/fipse-
publicweb/
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DiscussionMotivation
ARCS

• Attention
• Relevance
• Confidence
• Satisfaction

Keller, John. "Development and Use of the ARCS
model of Instructional Design." Journal of
Instructional Development 10 (3) 2-10.
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Nuts Bolts of Online Discussions
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Discussions

• Require them.

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Know your audience.

• Who are online students, generally?
• Need interaction with professor and with their
  classmates
• Are women, many of whom have families and/or jobs
• Are hard workers who consider themselves
  employees first, students second
• Are optimistic, confident, creative achievers
• Are not necessarily the strongest students
• Take online classes for a variety of reasons
• Are adults or non-traditional aged
• Are unfamiliar with online learning and with your
  course software
• Have a variety of interests, goals, and learning
  preferences

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Find out who your specific students are.
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Home Pages

• Why?
• Establishes a collegial environment
• Simulates face-to-face introductions that break
  the ice
• Builds confidence in the technology for new users
• What?
• Name, major, job, location, and hobbies
• What else?
• More than a résumé
• Picture
• "What do you hope to learn in this course?"
• Have students rank a list of topics or goals
• Previous knowledge or experience
• Then what?
• Students evaluate their peers' home pages

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Ask the Class

• Ask your classmates and me questions about the
  course or our readings. There are no stupid
  questions if you have a question about
  something, your classmates probably do, too. Ask
  away! Your class participation is measured in
  part by your willingness to ask and attempt to
  answer questions here.

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• Raise Your Hand vs. Ask the Class
• teacher-centered learner-centered

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Goals of Ask the Class

• decrease students anxiety
• increase students sense of competence and
  confidence
• gauge levels of understanding or frustration (or
  lack thereof)
• sort through misconceptions and confusion

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Ask the Class Students

• meaningful role
• peer tutoring
• cooperative
• safe place to show confusion
• virtual study group

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Ask the Class Instructor

• "How's it going? What questions do you have?"
• "Will some of you post some study tips or advice
  for your classmates?"
• "Yes, you're right! That's great advice!"
• "Those are good suggestions. Let me add my two
  cents as well.
• "That's a good question! Will a few of you offer
  your perspectives before I jump in?
• your availability
• their authority

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The Hallway

• This is where you can discuss whatever you want.
  It doesn't have to relate to this courseit's
  like talking in the hallway on campus.

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Goals of The Hallway

• informal, personal, non-academic connections
• letting off steam
• personalizing the learning environment
• The five minutes before and after your class

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Initiate the Discussion Keep It Going

• best movie, book, concert, CD, recipe, tool,
  gift, or outdoor activitysomething on the news
• movie recommendation
• holiday plans
• requests for weather reports from the students'
  various locations
• innermost thoughts on the Brad Pitt and Jennifer
  Aniston breakup
• any informal or non-academic comments you might
  make to students in a hallway on campus

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• classmate,
• rather than just student

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Structure in Discussions

• Clear due dates times
• Units or weeks
• Checklists for each week, unit, or learning
  sequence
• Learning goals or objectives for each sequence
• Estimate of how long students should spend on
  specific assignments

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Questions?

• Lets briefly pause for
• questions,
• before we move on to
• higher order issues

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• Higher Order
• Issues

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• Start with the pedagogy
• not the technology

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• insert apples oranges cartoon

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Preliminary Questions Food for Thought

• What do students learn from discussions?
• How else do they benefit from discussions?
• What do you do well in facilitating F2F
  discussions?

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Some Benefits of Discussion

• active learning, engaging in ideas
• exposure to other perspectives
• challenging groupthink or homogeneity
• social interaction
• develop interpersonal relationships
• academic and/or social support

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How can you translate these qualities to the
online environment?
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• Dont think its impossible or that OL
  discussions will lack something.
• Instead, identify your goals
• for OL discussions,
• and then just ask
• How?

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Meaningful roles for students

• Reporter (synthesize, summarize, and share with
  rest of the class)
• Moderator (keeping others on task, asking
  questions, maintaining Netiquette)

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Your role

• Post discussion prompt
• Hang back
• Post-discussion filling in gaps, clearing up
  misconceptions
• Give students tools to assess quality of
  contributions

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Kinds of discussions

• Open-ended questions
• Higher-order thinking

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Blooms Taxonomy
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Think TrixSpencer KaganCooperative
Learning Resources for Teachers
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The Six Facets of Understanding

• a multifaceted definition of understanding
• When we truly understand, we
• Can explain provide thorough, supported, and
  justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and
  data.
• Can interpret tell meaningful stories offer apt
  translations provide a revealing historical or
  personal dimension to ideas and events make it
  personal or accessible through images, anecdotes,
  analogies, and models.
• Can apply effectively use and adapt what we know
  in diverse contexts.
• Have perspective see and hear points of view
  through critical eyes and ears see the big
  picture.
• Can empathize find value in what others might
  find odd, alien, or implausible perceive
  sensitively on the basis of prior direct
  experience.
• Have self-knowledge perceive the personal style,
  prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that
  both shape and impede our own understanding we
  are aware of what we do not understand and why
  understanding is so hard.
• Chapter 4 in Understanding by Design by Grant
  Wiggins and Jay McTighe

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• Virtual Field
• Trips

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Discussions to Inspire Curiosity

• Introduce the debates, mysteries, paradoxes, or
  problems in your field.
• What was the moment you realized you wanted to
  pursue your field?
• What did (and do) you love about your discipline?
  
• What is your favorite issue or text in your
  field, and why?
• Share an annotated list of suggestions for
  further reading in your field, explaining why you
  chose each and what students would gain from
  each.

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Giving Feedback

• When?
• Immediacy of online environment
• The internet gives the impression of answering
  their every want and need now.
• Students may come to online classes with the
  unrealistic expectations of immediate
  gratification. After all, most other web
  services work this way!

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• How long will it take you to grade and return
  their papers, exams, lab reports?
• How long will you take to respond to email?
• What about weekends?

• How will you give feedback to discussions?
• Respond to every posting?
• Respond to those that need help?
• Respond to all (collectively) at end of week?

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Feedback on Learning

• Tell the class how you think they're doing as a
  whole
• what's been accomplished, what concepts or skills
  they're "getting"
• what work still needs to be done, what concepts
  or skills they're struggling with
• Offer tips, advice, links to other resources to
  help them with what they're struggling with
• Emphasize mastery of skills and content, rather
  than external goals of a grade
• Clarify and correct misconceptions
• Fill in gaps in the learning sequence

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Feedback on Learning,continued

• Offer some model work to show students what good
  performances look like
• anonymously
• refer to specific posted work
• Encourage them to self-assess their own work and
  their classmates' work by referring to your
  criteria when presenting sample work
• Raise questions to encourage students to review
  and articulate what they've learned in this unit

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Rubrics

• A rubric is an instrument that assesses student
  understanding and communicates your expectations
  very effectively.
• A good rubric indicates the criteria used to
  evaluate student performance and distinguishes
  among different levels of performance.

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How to make a good rubric

• Countless websites
• Arter, Judith and Jay McTighe (2001). Scoring
  Rubrics in the Classroom Using Performance
  Criteria for Assessment and Improving Student
  Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA Corwin Press.
• Stiggins, R. (1994). Student-Centered Classroom
  Assessment. New York Macmillan.
• Walvoord, B. Anderson, V. (1998) Effective
  Grading A Tool for Learning and Assessment. San
  Francisco Jossey-Bass, Inc.
• Wiggins, G. McTighe, J. (1998) Understanding By
  Design. Alexandria, VA Association for
  Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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Example Class Discussion Rubric for Literature
Class
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Samples of Student Work with Your Evaluations

• Assignment prompt
• Poor response
• Your feedback/evaluations
• Average response
• Your feedback/evaluations
• Above average response
• Your feedback/evaluations

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Virtual Office Hours

• Synchronous
• chat
• instant message
• archive
• email
• ongoing FAQ
• Asynchronous
• email
• discussion forum (public or private)

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Questions?

• Thank you!
• Nancy Chick
• UW-Barron County
• (and Jack Hazel)