CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Learning Online
Building Communities
DR: I'm David Roberts and I'm a senior lecturer in the management school in the faculty of Business and Law.
SP: I'mShyamendaPurslow and I'm a graduate teaching assistant with Faculty of Business and Law.
DR: The particular course that's of interest today is the final year undergraduate elective called Applied Management in Practice and the rules are you can join that course if you're a student who has found a 12 month or 8 month industrial placement. The first half of the course runs whilst the students are on industrial placements and then the second half of the course continues when they come back to university. Part of that runs online, a little bit of it face to face.
SP: In terms of building communities online, because the unit is based... well we use Moodle to run the unit. The first thing that we have to do is make sure that the students are comfortable with the new learning environment that they are going to be using. So we set up a few little minor tasks that should just encourage them to explore the Moodle site, find some resources, engage with the library website and locate resources there as well and then we know that they'll be able to keep up with what's going to be asked of them.
DR: Yeah, and that's important because as the lecturer you get very tempted to jump in straight away with content, content, content, so we've learned to hold back, go along with the introductions, let all the students introduce each other and meet each other, then we give them some interesting fun tasks, get them to explore thing. One of the tasks that's quite fun is we ask them to go and have coffee with their manager and explain what happens, so before they get stuck into the learning materials we've created that community.
SP: A big part of building community is that you are expected to set the tone so you want people to be communicating continuously or on an ongoing basis. What we try to do is have say Google Hangouts, and ensure that we offer one to one sessions by Skype or by telephone. We're fairly available by email. We've also tried putting together video newsletters or just video messages for the students because for those who, for whatever reason, can't schedule a one-to-one session it's useful for them to put a face to the name and it's very good for showing that it's being run in a very transparent way.
DR: What we do know is you'll get a resistance at the start. First of all, they're very keen to join an online course for multiple reasons There will be a proportion of students that think it's an easier option than coming in. But it's not easy because it's about being disciplined and you know, if you've got a lecture at 10 o'clock, you come in, you go to the lecture, you go the tutorial, it's done but the online stuff you can put off. What we find in this particular course is we get some resistance at the first assessment point. Once they're through that then they start to get it because it will be very different for them than their traditional experience, either at school, college and in their time at university.
Forums
DR: So about managing forums on online courses, I think the starting point is you’ve got to imagine that those forums are your lecture theatres and your tutorial rooms and that's so that the opportunity is there is for the students to network and meet and communicate. That is a starting point, and you have to set things up in terms of the philosophy or the culture of it, if you like, so the students understand that's what the forums are for.
SP: One way to do that is for the first two weeks, you need to be quite punctual, prompt, quick with your responses to make sure that people start to engage and the skill lies in being fairly quick at the beginning with responding and getting people involved and learning when to start easing off and leaving it to them because you've already set it up. You can try your own methods, we've tried loads.
DR: At the start of running the forums, you need a clear strategy in place so make the first two or three or four forum activities doable by everyone. So the first one is the introduction one about themselves.Introduce yourselves but give them a format so they can introduce themselves in the same way, that's good. Make the second forum activity something else they can do that's linked to your course but doesn't necessarily involve masses of reading because you're trying to get them used to the online platform first of all. One of the things we do is ask them to find an interesting article in the news that relates to this course which is of interest to you and then we give them a framework; what's the article, where did you find it, why is it of interest to you. In terms of trying to improve the quality of the posts,we figured out a really interesting strategy. We look for a good post and we write 'thank you for this post, it's a really interesting post, and this is why it's a really good post', so it's not incumbent on you as the lecturer to answer and comment on everything, in fact don't even try to, that would be a bad thing to do for you. Find the things that are really detailed and make comments on that because Ican assure you that the students are ringing every word that you write. The forums are not a place for any negative feedback at all;it's about finding the good and highlighting the good. With our weekly newsletters or videos we then highlight certain forum posts and thank those students for contributing in such a way.
SP: I would agree, it goes back to remembering that is your online classroom. If someone gave a one line response in the classroom what would your reaction be?You wouldn't start giving them a sonnet on how badly they did. You would pick out on what was useful and you would apply it to demonstrate how everyone else could do it. Becausethere's no guaranteeyou’ll get a high quality post so then you have to set the example to show what's expected.But you can't keep doing that because then everyone will wait for you and say 'well, I'll wait to see what they post first and then I'll know what the standard is'. You have to give them that freedom and trust them, trust that the students are very engaged and they are intelligent and they know what they are doing. Sometimes they just might have slight concerns.
DR: We also have a secret weapon, which is this.Here is the secretweapon: when a student does some particularly good posts, you write to them outside of the forum. You thank them for their contribution and you encourage them to comment on other posts like you would comment in the normal classroom. So three or four weeks in you've maybe got seven or eight of these secret weapons running so there's not just one of you in the forum, there's eight or nine of you trying to support the learning of the other students.