Week 4: Interacting and collaborating online: providing feedback and moderating class discussions.

UC Week 5

11th of March 2010

This session involved:

• setting up and trialling a test forum on the ‘playpen’ Moodle page for this unit
• setting up and moderating a ‘real’ forum on the same page over the following week
• identifying and sharing tips on forums using a Google docs page
  • ranking those tips using SurveyGizmo

The Moodle Playpen

These are Moodle sites which are available for use to practice and experiment with. (They are also called Moodle Sandpits). I like the analogy of having somewhere safe to practice Moodling before making sites available to students and/or the wider world.

Moodle Playpen

There is a website called The Moodle Playpen which describes these in more detail – I can’t work out if it is an official Moodle site or just some guys blog… I think that is the nature of Moodle, it is the sum of a whole range of contributors.

Forums or fora???

Fora is a plural of forum,  but it does sound like a bit of a w#$k…

The ABC, for a brief time, had a radio segment called Fora, but it has been changed to Big Ideas (there was a TV version too, which is also now called Big Ideas which links to Fora.tv – I am glad the people of Tuvalu are making some money out of their unique domain name!) So, maybe the ABC realised it was a bit of a wobbly word to use too.

Forums appears to be an equivalent word. This is much discussed in all sorts of forums…

I will call them forums.

Moodle Forums

Moodle has a nice forum function, which allows discussion of topics to be contributed to and viewed by site users (the administrator can decide who does and doesn’t see specific forums if there are subgroups within the class).

The pedagogical basis of forums is based on the need to replicate the benefits of face to face contact in distance education. Some of the disadvantages of distance learning are considered to be :

“We can’t see each other and talk with each other back and forth with the same immediate level of interaction. We can’t glance at students during a lecture to determine how well they understand the material. We also lose a degree of the students’ level of commitment to the course by showing up to the classroom.”

“Communication affects student engagement…when students are actively engaged in the course, they will keep participating in the course activities and communicating with you and other students. “

To make up for this, online forums can be used to maintain communication between students and teachers. They also allow opinions and thoughts to be shared without the time and performance pressures that exist in a face to face environment. This can lead to more carefully considered opinions, but at the price of spontaneity.

Sychronous and asynchronous forums, and other means of communication, are discussed next week.

The test forum was a simple exercise to learnt the mechanics of the forum tool. I had used this previously in my teaching, and set up the forum below:

test forum

Good fun, and a nice way to get to know the class a bit better (even though we were sitting next to each other whilst doing this!) Each class member set up their own forum (see the Playpen screen shot above) and we spent a bit of time experimenting with the features of the tool. It quickly became clear that there were some important setup and structural points that needed to be considerd to have an effective forum (described below).

The next task, and our homework for the week, was to create and moderate a “more formal” forum, to be discussed in next weeks class. I chose a topic related to my teaching, and posed it to the class;  there was a good amount of activity over the week. 18 replies are listed on my log, but half of them are me replying to others replies!

There was much discussion about the time and energy needed to keep up with moderating this type of activity. I made the following post in response to the general discussion on this topic:

“Yes, we are all very keen and so the forum gains a life of its own, growing exponentially.
I am procrastinating today… With the 10 of us (including Danny):

• 1 post each = 10 posts
  • 1 response to each post by each of us = 100 posts
    • 1 response to each of those posts by each of us = 1000 posts
      • you get the idea…

      My head really does hurt now.”

I use forums in my teaching, especially for the students to keep in touch with each other , and me, when they are on clinical placements. The log below shows the overall forum posting activity for one of my units – note the numbers on the y axis! (there are 45 students in this class)

The activity level of students shadows my activity (about a weeks lag) with an initial peak during the  placements (1 day per week), and subsequently around the due date for the assessment for those placements. Interestingly, after the 4th April, when the students all left Canberra for a 1 week externship, there was a large peak of self-sustained forum posting activity by students, and another peak 2 weeks after when the assesment for the externship was due. The volume, range and quality of student postings, and the general cameraderie that was evident, strongly supports the use of forums as an effective way for students and teachers to keep in touch over distance, and as a useful tool for reflection after the experience.

all posts

There was assessment associated with this forum use, consisting of minor marks for “engagement with the forum” and more substantial marks for “quality of reflection and discusssion based upon the exercises set for the externship”. I consider this to be a succesful inducement for students to use the forums, and to ensure that they participate at an acceptable level. This same unit had a similar structure in the previous year,;however no marks were associated with the forum- it was not accessed once during the semester.

There were academc and social aspects to this forum, and they complemented each other well – students took great pride in sharing the things they had seen and done and how they were solving the issues presented to them in the assessment pieces set for the externship. For many of the students it was their first time in that environment, and many of the posts were made to support peers and share solutions to these common problems and challenges.

Maintaining this forum in the initial stages required a large amount of time, which became impossible to continue as the semester progressed and other commitments took priority. The real art in forum moderating is to “light the spark” so that the forum members then give it a life of its own independent of the moderator’s input.

This is supported by the list of “Forum Tips” below which the class compiled after the forum exercise (initially using Google docs, then ranked on SurveyGizmo).

Moodle Forum – Tips and Recommendations

Page One

// 1. Rank the following tips

1]	Have a clear, interesting, open question.
2]	Respond to all posts in an interested and engaged way.
3]	Identify themes from posts and use these to generate new threads.
4]	Clarify the question if the discussion is going off track or allow the discussion to take tangents if that is the intention.
5]	Sum up the discussion at the end.
6]	Put the headings and actual question in the right spot. i.e. Forum Name, Forum Introduction etc
7]	Make the first post is a good leaping off point for the forum with an engaging statment or question.
8]	Make sure that the question is a real question rather than a statement or is written in such a way as to provoke a response.
9]	Maintain correct grammar and spelling. It’s good manners.
10]	Make it fun or add an element of fun to improve engagement.
11]	Avoid abbreviations and jargon.
12]	Be very clear what is expected from students in terms of number of posts, length of posts and level of academic writing.
13]	If moderating, create strategies to enable you to return to the forum at regular intervals.
14]	Politely move the discussion back on topic if it starts to stray, unless it has relevence or promotes learning.
15]	Ensure all students/participants have access to the forum and the technological knowledge necessary for engagement.
16]	Have a practice with students in class if it is a new learning tool for them.
17]	Put your name and photo on your discussion board to create a personal e-relationship.
18]	Don’t start too many threads as learners will be put off replying to any of them.
19]	Put up your discussion in a timely manner so that participants have plenty of time to respond.
20]	Prompt engagement half way through the allocated time to try to keep momentum going throughout the forum.
21]	Mix a serious question with a fun question to mix academic learning with social networking.
22]	Don’t engage in an on line discussion forum with too many people (max of 10).

I think that sums it up very nicely!

Critical reflection, Documentation

fora, forums, GoogleDocs, Moodle, pharmacy students, SurveyGizmo, user statistics

June 5, 2010

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