Blended Learning: Research Perspectives
Blended learning for big classes
I teach in a private Taiwanese institution and one of the challenges for me is teaching online or hybrid courses to classes that are generally big in sizes. Having a class of 50 students in a freshman class is not uncommon. And some of them have over 65 students. It has made my course management extremely difficult. Monitoring group activities and online forums have been very burdensome for me. I am thinking about having students rotate to faciliate their groups so that they can assume an ownership in online participation. However, with these big classes, tracking the students' performance can still be overwhelming. Any tips?
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Facebook
Google
Yahoo- Login or register to post comments
- 2075 reads
- Email this page
- Printer friendly version
Increasing efficiency in online forums and group activities
Loretta posted "group activities and online forums have been very burdensome for me. I am thinking about having students rotate to facilitate their groups." There are various tactics that could be used to help manage the online groups.
First, using rubrics to rate students participation on a 3-point scale (above average, average, and below average) can make assessing online discussion more efficient.
Next, you could designate a team facilitator that would facilitate discussions making them group discussions more self-managed. The facilitator could be given a list of tips on facilitating discussions (i.e., visiting the discussion forum other day, playing devil's advocate, asking opened ended questions, asking for support or examples). The facilitator role could rotate each week.
Third, you could have students grade each others performance and their own. The average grade would be their participation grade for the group activities. This could be done through a survey tool for more efficient analysis.
Tanya Joosten
Instructional Design Consultant
Lecturer
Unviersity Wisconsin-Milwaukee
group facilitative technique
I tried Tanya's suggestion for my online classes this semester and it somehow had lessen my load a bit. However, my freshment students need a LOT OF guidance in terms of what to do to moderate their groups. I feel that I am teaching my communication class all over again in my other non-communication classes.
What would be a good survey tool for peer evaluation? I have a student aid to help me track the participation but still I feel overwhelmed. Partially it is because I do have to use Chinese to moderate these classes and it is not easy to type in Chinese if I should say so.
Loretta Y. Teng
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Central Taiwan Univ. of Science and Technology
Facilitating Discussions
Loretta:
Also, below is a tip sheet I give my students during our first discussions to guide them on their interactions a bit to help facilitate discussion. It is in an effort to get them to critically analyze each other's ideas. It might help or you can revise it for your students -- make a facilitation guide for the leaders.
Tanya M. Joosten
Instructional Design Consultant
Learning Technology Center
University Wisconsin-Milwaukee
tjoosten@uwm.edu
Discussion Guides:
Itemize opinion(s) from all relevant sides of an issue and collect logical argument supporting each.
Break the arguments into their constituent statements and draw out various additional implication(s) from these statements.
Examine these statements and implications for internal contradictions.
Locate opposing claims between the various arguments .
Require sufficient support to justify any incredible claims.
Be thinking of these things when you post your discussion questions and particularly when you are responding to your classmates. Make sure to probe your classmates for support of their answers. Play devil's advocate to provoke thought by all. Correct statements that contain misinformation.
Peer Eval Tools
Loretta:
Below is one that you might find useful. The formatting doesn't hold here, so feel free to e-mail me if you want the full formatted handout.
Tanya M. Joosten
Instructional Design Consultant
Learning Technology Center
University Wisconsin-Milwaukee
tjoosten@uwm.edu
Guides to managing and assessing groups
Peer evaluation of group participation
Group Name: _______________________
Your name: _____________________________________
This is a peer review activity. Each member of the group will evaluate each group member, including self, by assigning the total number of points that group member achieved. I will use the mean number of points assigned by group members to each individual to determine the total number of points achieved by each individual in that group. The mean score will represent 25% of the 100 possible points for group participation. The remaining 75% will be evaluated by me.
In the table below, please enter the point value you have assigned (0 – 25) to each member of your group, including yourself. After completing the table, please submit a copy of this form to me using the Digital Dropbox no later than Friday at 11:59PM.
One of our responsibilities as leaders is to confront individuals who have poor performance. If you are assigning a point value of less than 20 to any one of your group members, please indicate to me whether you had addressed the performance issue with this group member shortly after it had occurred.
Yes ____ No ____
Full Names of Group Members Point Assignment (0 – 25)
group facilitative techniques/jan
Hello, Loretta. I have just joined this forum and this discussion (May 27, 2007), so am possibly not as familiar yet with the topic and the format.
But I DO teach four blended learning classes: 3 for the university, and 1 at the community college.
What is the course management system you are using? Here, each of the courses I am talking about (and teaching in fall 2007) uses Blackboard. The university uses one (advanced) variation; the community college uses a basic version. Both are similar in command structure, though.
In each, there seems to be a Blackboard enabling feature that allows me to hit certain keys--I never remember which they are and always have to look them up in a manual--and have a particular student's posts retrieved and gathered for me to re-examine. Looking at those enables me relatively quickly to grade the quality of discussion - both for original postings and for comments on what others have previously posted.
If you have a similar feature in your course management system, evaluating the quality of your students' postings might go faster and easier. I'm not sure what you are teaching or how you are thinking of rating them. I tend to look for critical thinking such as analysis, synthesis, or evaluation, and for some creative ideas as being good qualities. I also try to devise prompts for discussion questions that will require some outside research or some critical thinking (the three levels of Bloom's taxonomy as labeled above), and perhaps a go-find or go-do activity at least 2x a semester before the student has enough information to post what has happened or describe what he or she has discovered.
If you'd like to write me back via e-mail, please post me, and if possible, put your name and SLOAN in the subject title. I'm busy getting ready to run a blended course starting on June 5th--for eight weeks, two evenings a week. Course is Eng. 102 (Argument, analysis, research) in which they will write two 10-page documented research papers by the end of July.
janetbone
US - Chicago suburbs
And best wishes to you in Taiwan. I had the great pleasure of visiting your country some years ago, and still remember its beauty, especially at Sun Moon Lake and in Hinschu.
Jan Bone
Thank you Tanya
Tanya, this is very helpful. I'll try these out with my next sets of classes. I am hoping that online groups yield more chances for those who are quiet and reserved to participate.
Thank you very much.
Loretta Y. Teng
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Central Taiwan Univ. of Science and Technology
Thank you for sharing
Thanks, everyone for sharing your tips and resources. There is certainly a lot to learn.
Loretta Teng
Central Taiwan Univ. of Science and Technology
Re: Thank you for sharing
Online student management systems are available similar to CMS software a few searches on google should bring up some results you may ask the school to purchase a commercial version to install for better assessment of the students works. Some think online work is going to be easy and that they'll get through it quite fast like getting a fake degree to get jobs faster after college.
Large classes
You might want to try
http://www.center.rpi.edu/PCR/Proj_Model.htm
A number of models are listed here that might be useful...
Peter Shea
Educational Theory and Practice
University at Albany, SUNY
Effective Practices Editor: Sloan-C
Albany, NY 12222
teaching hybrid/blended in large courses
I'm currently teaching in Hybrid mode in an Anthropology course with 75-80 students. I use our CMS' online quizzing feature for basic testing, along with "clickers" during class to prompt discussions and evaluate students' understanding of what we are dealing with on any given day. So both of these are automated events, which involve not very much time or effort for me to arrange.
I ask the students to complete an "exit" assignment each day, which is a spontaneous response to something we have been discussing. I grade these on a 0-1-2 point basis, reducing the number of assessment decisions that I have to make for each paper (typically I also put a couple of comments on each).
The online portion of the course involves various mini-fieldwork assignments that the students complete outside of class and post to the CMS discussion forum. My TA and I respond to these, and the students respond to one another's. Here, a nicely detailed assignment and/or rubric allows rapid assessment and feedback.
Of course, the online work is integrated with the F2F class, but I do that principally through the use of clickers.
This works pretty well for me, and the students seem to be -- according to my surveys during the course -- happy with the amount of discussion both online and F2F. Not everyone does well on their exams, but at a first-year level the students understand that they have to master the basic jargon of the field.
regards, Alan
Alan Aycock, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Learning Technology Center
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Tips for Managing Blended Learning for big classes
Hi Loretta,
FYI, I just finished co-facilitating an online workshop on optimizing class size, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. ;-) You didn't mention what discipline you are teaching, but here are some ideas and resources which can be applied to a variety of disciplines:
1) See Murray Turoff's paper "Managing a Large Distance Course Using Webboard" at
http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/manageDL.html -- in particular six principles he identified for managing large online courses.
2) Check out Guy Bensusan's COLA (Collaborative Online Learning Algorithm) model at http://www.knowmap.com/open/bensusan_distance_cola.html -- he used student-centered discussion to reduce instructor workload and increase buy-in and learning.
I hope this is helpful...
Class Size
I Agree woth John Sener regarding the vitality of class size in Synchronous Learning. There is a need to make education more productive:
(i) Because of the need to reduce cost in a competitive scenario,
(ii) Severe shortage of good teachers
(iii) Increasing emaphasis on Dual degree etc.
So let's expect to be asked to cater to such challenges.
However there is a need to reduce the class size to improve class effectiveness. So we are back to square one- which again drives us for a need to hold a big class and simultaneously a smaller one.
The methodology is that when one teacher stops in a class of 400 students, suddenly many tutors are available to cater to their individual needs, analogous to " Each One- Teach One.
Priyavrat Thareja
www.thareja.com
Thanks, John
Thank you so much John, for taking the time to respond. I will take a look of the links you provided and look forward to learning more about how to make the forums more learner-centered. By the way, the Taiwanese students' tendency to be nonexpressive also requires a lot of "drawing out" and that's making online faciliatation more cumbersome.
I have a background in counseling and teach a variety of social science courses from psychology, interpersonal communication, to human/social behavioral studies.
Thanks again.