7 Habits of Highly Effective Online Discussion Participants

Most students hate online discussion. It’s true. Ask them. I don’t blame them. I hate it too. Ha! Yep, I just admitted that. It’s not the idea behind asynchronous discussion that I dislike. It’s how it is implemented in most online courses. It’s almost as if it’s an after thought. Oh wait, I need some student to student interaction, so I’ll throw a few questions in a discussion forum and be done with it. There’s no clear purpose. Then 24 students all jump in and try to manage what can quickly become unruly or worse boring and meaningless. First, my horror story. How do 24 students “discuss” this question: What was the theme of the story? Yes, I’ve seen that discussion question in an online course. Well, after the first student nails the answer, and it didn’t take long in this case. Everyone waiting 4 days until the one brave soul responded with the correct answer. Done. What was everyone else supposed to say after that? Not much and the discussion was a flop. Twenty-four students echoing the same response. And I’ve seen worse.

There’s a lot that goes into creating successful asynchronous discussion in online courses. I talk a little about some of it in the video at the end of this post. Instead of elaborating on that further, I’d rather share with you a very rewarding asynchronous discussion going on right now in my ENG102 online course. Discussions don’t have to take place in a traditional discussion forum. That’s the first lesson. In this case, my real goal, aside from getting students to interact with each other, was to have students help each other out with their writing by offering some valuable feedback. This discussion begins in Connect Composition where students submit their latest essays. I set up a peer review assignment and put students in groups of 3. Their goal at this stage is to review the other two papers in their group and offer feedback based on the 6 questions I set up for them to answer.

The objective is twofold: challenge students’ knowledge and understanding on the concepts required to write the paper and help each other discover strengths and weaknesses in the paper based on those general concepts. For instance, one of the questions students respond to is based on one of the competencies on the rubric for the paper: Does the paper clearly define the issue or problem only and not state a position or proposed solution? Does the writer remain objective or can you tell which side of the argument he/she is on? It’s more like a check list, but students are encourage to comment as well. They are not asked to grade the paper or edit the paper – just answer the questions.

In the second phase of this discussion activity, students are ask to participate in a more free discussion to offer more general feedback. Here is my discussion prompt:

Group 3: Discussion 3: Peer Reviews Paper 2

On Monday, after you have submit your paper in Connect, participate in the peer review process in Connect where you will peer review your 2 teammates’ papers. Watch how: http://youtu.be/N-gYmdV_P0A

After you’ve done your peer reviews, come back here and reflect on your experience. Did you get good feedback? Was it helpful? What else do you need to know to help make your outline better? Provide feedback and ask questions here to complete discussion 3.

Most students are so excited to participate in this part of the discussion. They thank each other for the feedback they receive. They sum up their thoughts on the individual papers and offer suggestions to make it better. It’s turned into something completely different than what I anticipated. See below for an example of part of a discussion from a group. Students have expressed that they like the peer review and the concluding discussion because they feel they are helping each other and they feel bad if someone helps them and they done reciprocate.

Click to image to see in full size

As a result of these types of discussions, students have found friends in the course and “hang out” with each other online. A key element to this is I haven’t done much changing to the groups. Some groups are not as successful and when a change has been made, students have been thankful. An added benefit for me is that the rewrites on these papers after the peer reviews and discussion are much better and students are more confident about their work. I can’t wait until the end of the semester when I poll students on which aspects of the course they found most helpful in their learning. Usually the discussion forum ends up dead last. I have a feeling this semester, they might be at the top of the list. We’ll see.

Two Components of Successful Asynchronous Discussions in Online Courses

I can’t remember when I first started using SoftChalk, but it seems like it’s been about 10 years. That’s how long the company has been around (since 2002). I’ve been using the tool to help create interactive lessons for my online and hybrid courses. We’ve had it available to us (Maricopa) for quite a while now, but when our current contract expired, we decided we needed to go out for RFP to make sure we were using the best product and paying the best price. I’d never thought much about it until I realized there might be a possibility of having to use something else. But when I express my concerns to my colleagues, all I ever get in response is: “What is SoftChalk?”

Well, that’s part of the problem, not enough faculty know the answer to that question. So the few of us who do know, may suffer the consequences. There will always be a need for an interactive lesson builder,  and I vote that we keep what we already know.  However, if there is something else out there that will blow me away without causing me stress learning how to use it, I’d be open to that too. In the mean time, here’s hoping others in the district find this video interesting enough to start using Softchalk while we await the verdict.

At GCC we have another option for conducting online peer review assignments in the composition course. I previously posted about the option I use in Connect Composition, but today I want to share with you a 2nd way that a few of our faculty are using.  Below is the method that Gary Lawrence uses. I posted previously about his heads up about this process, but this post will give a few more details on how it all works. He even shared a video below that he made for students to show them the peer review process.

It’s not a perfect process, but it works well enough if you don’t have access to Connect Composition. It requires that students have MS Word to be able to “track changes” and leave comments on the documents. There are work arounds for that, but it might further complicate the process. Below is an image Gary created for students to explain the peer review process to them.

And if you missed the previous post, here is Gary’s explanation of how he sets up the peer reviews in Canvas:

This is the way the peer review process works in Canvas: As part of a draft assignment, I usually let Canvas assign the peer reviews automatically. The cleanest way to do that, I think, is to “lock” submissions, so you don’t have a bunch of late contenders to deal with.  So under the draft assignment, I give a due date, and then  I select “more options” (shown in blue box below) and check “require peer reviews,” “automatically assign peer reviews,” pick the number of reviews per student, tell Canvas when to assign the peer reviews (default = assignment due date), and then “lock submits after (date)” to keep it clean.    I also happen to restrict inputs to .doc or .docx files so students can use “track changes” features of MS Word for line comments.

Below is a guest post from Gary Lawrence, adjunct English faculty member teaching online and hybrid at GCC. He shares his experience with doing peer reviews using Canvas and points out one minor flaw in Canvas that everyone should be aware of to help out this process. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll pass them on to Gary.

This is the way the peer review process works in Canvas: As part of a draft assignment, I usually let Canvas assign the peer reviews automatically. The cleanest way to do that, I think, is to “lock” submissions, so you don’t have a bunch of late contenders to deal with.  So under the draft assignment, I give a due date, and then  I select “more options” (shown in blue box below) and check “require peer reviews,” “automatically assign peer reviews,” pick the number of reviews per student, tell Canvas when to assign the peer reviews (default = assignment due date), and then “lock submits after (date)” to keep it clean.    I also happen to restrict inputs to .doc or .docx files so students can use “track changes” features of MS Word for line comments.

The issue:  Setting up new assignments is fine.  Be cautious using this “lock” function: When the assignment “locks,” the students literally don’t see any more text except the assignment title/due date et al and the words “assignment locked.” The text of your assignment disappears to them.  But you still see it in full.

The main issue is when you copy a course from one semester to the other.  While (I believe) the due date and date for peer review assignments carries over to new dates, the assignment “lock” date DOES NOT — it remains the original assignment date.  So a spring 2013 draft assignment (Jan – May) had an assignment lock date of December 2012, because I copied the contents from a Fall 2012 class.

These occurrences are hard to discover but easy to fix — they are often discovered during class presentations (LOL).  To the instructor, the entire text of the assignment is still there — but there is a little note at the top saying, “Assignment locked December XX,  2012 at 12:01 am”).  To the students, the entire assignment is blank, no text, nothing more than the assignment title, due date, and points.

The fix?  Go in to the assignment, click “more options, and manually CHANGE the “assignment lock” date to sometime AFTER the “reviews assigned” date/time.  My assignments are all due at 11:55 pm, so my “lock” times are 12:01 the next morning.

Requested Fix from Canvas: Make “locked” dates change along with “assignment due dates” and “peer review assigned” dates.   This is currently a manual function to fix and as noted, easy to miss.

To learn more about how to create your own peer review assignments in Canvas, read the next post that shows you how to do that. Gary has a video that I share with you.

Three years ago when we did our last book adoption, one of the features we were looking for was a way to do peer reviews on student essays in an online environment. We chose a McGraw-Hill text because they had a tool that does this well. The tool is called Connect Composition and it comes packaged with our traditional textbook. Also built into our version of Connect is an online handbook, The McGraw-Hill Handbook. But within Connect we have the ability to set up peer review writing assignments. We can schedule the number of drafts we want to have for the writing assignment, choose pre-made review questions or write our own, and choose the size and makeup of the groups. It’s a pretty slick way to do peer reviews, and it’s really easy for students.

Below I created a video for students showing them how to participate in our most recent peer review writing assignment. Feel free to use this video with your own students if you are using Connect in your classes.

I’ve talked about Piazza before, but that was before I really had a chance to use it. I introduced it to students in my online ENG102 course last semester, but I think students asked about 3 questions all semester. They resorted to texting and emailing me most of the semester, and I pretty much didn’t enforce the “Ask Piazza rule.” But this semester, not only am I insisting that students use Piazza to ask questions, I’m also using it for discussions. This is part of my MIL project I’m working on this semester.

Using Piazza is very easy, especially since Piazza has an LTI that lets you integrate the tool right into Canvas. So I have a button on the menu bar that opens Piazza right in the Canvas window. It also takes the user information from Canvas to authenticate the user in Piazza, so they only have to log in once (to Canvas) and then they can go straight to Piazza without having to log in again there. I think I’ve already talked about how the Q&A works in Piazza. This post is more about using it as a discussion forum.

In Piazza instructors and students can ask questions or post notes in the Q&A forum. If they post a question, users are prompted to supply an answer to the question. Instructors have a place to answer and students have a separate box to answer in. Student answers are like a wiki. Other students can edit the answer to try to improve it. The instructor can then mark the answer as a “Good Answer.” I plan to use this feature in some manner later down the road. For now, I’m using the “notes” posts for small group discussions. When you post a note, users are not prompted for an answer, but are encouraged to post “followup discussions.” Follow up discussions let students post their own responses and then let’s others reply. Each student can post a followup discussion within a note.

So to get students started and familiar with this new tool usage, I put them in groups of four and ask for them to discuss the topics they were considering for the research projects. I asked that they each run their topics by the four group members and then provide feedback to each other. These smaller discussions are easier to manage in this setting because it’s easy to create groups in Piazza. Students only see their own group discussions, and with only 4 students, the pressure is on to do their part and participate. At least that is the hope.

So far students are slow to share their ideas in these smaller groups. It’s early in the semester and I think most are still trying to feel their way around Canvas and the new class. Also they still have to learn good online course habits, like not waiting until the weekend (last minute) to do their work. Checking in on the last day of the week to do work can be overwhelming, and it doesn’t give them the chance to actually engage with the other students in the discussions. And that is the purpose of these small group discussions.

For two years we’ve been discussing a common assessment tool to use in all of our freshman composition courses at GCC, from ENG071 all the way up to ENG102. I participate in the ENG102 assessment group since I teach that course every semester. The course competency that we decided to focus on was: Find, evaluate, select, and synthesize both online and print sources that examine a topic from multiple perspectives. Our course competencies are so broad, as you can see, so we started by writing several Student Learning Objectives (SLO).

We then choose SLO 3: Locate at least one online source and determine the credibility of it by evaluating the validity of information contained within each source. We came up with a few tools that we could use for this assessment in our individual classes. This semester we have started to collect data from this common assessment, but I think we still have some ironing out to do.

For instance, we’ve agreed on a common tool or a collection of tools to use in this assessment, but we’ve never really discussed a rubric in which to evaluate this assessment. I think coming up with a rubric will help make the assessment valid. That way if won’t matter which tool we use to assess the SLO. How we evaluate our students’ work will be the key to success. With this in mind, I actually give students a choice in which evaluation tool they want to use in this assessment, but no matter which one they choose, I use the same rubric to evaluate their work. I think we should adopt a rubric for everyone to use in this process.

Below is my rubric followed by the assignment (Assignment #4) that I give students.

In my ENG102 Freshman Composition course I have 10 assignments and four papers that students do before they submit their final research projects. Five of the assignments are research assignments and are required in order to submit a final paper. I named the research assignments Odysseys, something I borrowed from a colleague years ago when I first started teaching at CAC. The whole idea of the Odyssey assignments is to get students practicing several research skills in one assignment that are directly related to their final projects. This is how I introduce these assignments to students.

What is an Odyssey?

An odyssey, famous for a Greek epic poem (attributed to Homer) describing the journey of Odysseus after the fall of Troy, is a long wandering and eventful journey. This is a perfect description for writing a research paper. It’s not something that we put together in a day. Writing a research paper is a long wandering and eventful journey, so some of the key journeys in this process have been labeled odysseys to indicate their importance. All Odyssey assignments are required and must be submitted in order for your final paper to be accepted. No skipping Odysseys. They are mandatory.

The Odyssey assignments include:

• Locating Sources on the Internet
• Locating Books on the Online Library Catalog
• Locating Periodicals in Databases
• Scholarly Journal Search
• Locating References Sources (in the Library/not online)

All five assignments have similar elements. For one, at least one of the sources they discover during each of the research assignments must be used in the final paper. This helps eliminate students turning in some random paper at the end. It’s more difficult if they have to integrate these sources into a paper that is already written. Or if they are doing it correctly, it makes it easier to integrate sources into a final paper by doing it a little at a time.

Each assignments also calls for students to either summarize, paraphrase or quote from the sources found. Each assignment focuses on just one note taking skill in each assignment. Each assignment asks for students to think critically about the usefulness of the chosen source, both specifically on the topic and on the source type in general. For instance, when searching for reference sources, they must choose four different types of references sources and discuss how each is useful for the given project. In addition, they contemplate how the specific information discover can be used in their final paper.

Lastly, each assignment requires that students practice documentation style by adding all the new sources to a working bibliography. The first half of the class they learn MLA, and then we switch to APA in the second half. So students are required to take a MLA working bibliography and transfer it over to APA format. They have several lessons on the major differences between the two and in what situations they would choose one or the other.

Each assignment, including the other five non-odyssey assignments, build on the final project. When students have worked their way through all the assignments in the class, it’s just a matter of revision, editing, and expanding their final paper. They have plenty of sources and plenty of notes that they’ve already spent time evaluating, citing and synthesizing into smaller assignments. It’s teaches students that writing a research paper is process, and if done right, it’s not that difficult to do.

Initially students don’t care too much for Diigo when I introduce it in an assignment in Week 2 of the semester. They’re still trying to get used to all the other new technology in the online course, and Diigo is almost the stone that breaks the camel’s back. But not quite. They warm up to it as the course moves on. I’ve questioned whether having students use yet another technology tool is too much for them to deal with, but the advantages of what they learn and experience by using it out weighs any reservations I may have had.

So, what exactly are the advantages of having students use this social bookmarking tool? First, they are in the exploratory phase of their research projects. They’re still trying to figure out what good topics are, so in order to not have them wondering alone in this process, I have them sharing ideas. Diigo allows for students to share bookmarks with each other in a group area. All of the sites saved in the group show up for all to see.

As shown in the image above, I teach students about taxonomy. Taxonomy is a way to group things together using tags. It makes it easier for students to find common topics within the group posts. Students are supposed to use the class theme tag: “personal+freedoms” along with 5 of their own tags based on the subject of the site bookmarked. Diigo then creates a tag list (right below) for the group so students can look at the most popular topics that emerge during the search process. Rights, laws, health and the constitution are all popular with students.

Students also practice their summarization skills, as they are to write 2-3 sentence summaries for each website they save. This way other students looking at the list will see a brief summary before clicking through to the link. If a student likes the saved site, he/she can “Like” it or they can comment on the saved bookmark. Many impromptu discussions come from this.

The Diigo group becomes another place for students to discuss topics with built in discussion forums. Diigo gives you the option to post a bookmark or a topic. The topic is set up just like a discussion forum. You can set up one with a specific question you want for students to discuss. These discussion “topics” are not threaded however.

Of course students figure out quickly that Diigo is a good place to store some of their online research so it’s easily accessible, but I think the greatest skill students learn by doing this assignment is that they can continue to help each other out during the research process. I’ve seen students continue to share different websites in the Diigo group because they know what other students are interested in and this is a place where those interested will see them.

You can read more about the Diigo assignment here: Social Bookmarking in the Freshman Composition Research Class.

I can still remember when Delicious was all the rage. Remember when you had to remember where all the periods went – del.icio.us. I’m not sure I got it right, but those were the days. Then Delicious got bought by Yahoo! and was shelved. Then Yahoo! sold it to the current owners who have, to their credit, tried to regain the hold on the social bookmarking space. But that is all for not, as Diigo took the opportunity to step in when Delicious struggled and created a more education centric service that still thrives today.

I’ve used Diigo in my Freshman Composition ENG102 courses now for about 5-6 years. It’s a research class, so I like to get students started in the research process with something easy – Googling and sharing what they find with each other. I set up the assignment to get students to explore the course theme: personal freedoms to help narrow the focus of their individual research topics. I’ve posted the meat of the assignment below.

Setting Up & Using Diigo

We will use Diigo throughout the semester to keep track of the websites we find during the research process. When you save a webpage, it’s called bookmarking. Diigo is a social bookmarking site. It’s social because it allows for all of us to share our bookmarks with each other. It’s like a big researching party!

Watch this screencast: Setting Up & Using Diigo to learn how to set-up and use Diigo.

Assignment Steps

Prepare:

• Read the online handbook chapter and watch the lesson video above. Also read the information about Diigo, watch the Diigo videos and register for an account.
• Join the ENG102 Diigo group.

Search:

• Start with Google. Open a browser and type: http://www.google.com
• Type in different search terms relating to our discussion on personal freedoms. Remember the sky is the limit. We are only exploring, so try many different search terms.
• Use the tips you learned in the Searching the Internet video.

Bookmark:

• Using the Diigo site, bookmark 10 websites about personal freedoms that you find interesting. Choose a variety of topics that fall under personal freedoms.
• Give each site you save a Title or edit the current title to make it clear (1 point each).
• Tag the sites with terms that relate to the site, including the tag: personal+freedoms (don’t forget the plus sign +) You need at least 3 tags for each bookmarked website (1 point each).
• Write a short summary of the website in the Comment box, so that others will have a good idea what the site offers before clicking the links. Summaries should be 2-3 sentences (1 point each).

Submit:

• To submit your 10 links for grading, all you have to do is make sure you are a member of the ENG102 Diigo Group. I decided not to send invites. Just join the group below after you set up your account and I’ll approve you.
• ENG102 Diigo Group <– Click to Join

Example Assn #2

This is a screen capture of a student’s Diigo page. Make sure you have 10 entries that look like this.

Read more about Diigo: What Do Students Learn by Using Social Bookmarking Site Diigo?