Reaching a level of quality on the class message boards

When using message boards, you may worry about how you will get your class to the desired level of quality in their written conversations. However, you may find, as I have, that a collective--and constructive--norming occurs in this environment, and this usually happens quickly in the term. While teacher grading and participation will help with this, you may be surprised to find that you are not even the most important factor.

I provide careful instructions to my students about course expectations on the message boards, as I've mentioned in a previous post, and I can continue to say that I have yet to have a student question a grade on a single post. It's never happened. In addition, I've noticed, as have my students this fall (we were just talking about this), that the level of conversation in the course on the message boards improves as the term goes on. Why?

In an environment in which students write publicly, class norms are established among the students in the class, and if you couple this with some informal grading and some participation on your part, you will not need to monitor the boards constantly and to grade to the point of burn-out. The students in the class quickly elevate their level of contribution to the course conversation, reaching a group norm of the expectation of quality--which you can defined in a number of ways--for the written message board work in the course.

I think this is a function of three interrelated factors: One, simple grading of discussion posts as informal work (say, on a quick 10-point scale per post or a weekly holistic grade) provides an ongoing feedback loop for students throughout the term. They get lots of grades, and they are not waiting for weeks to see just what their teacher thinks about their writing. Also, the many low-stakes grades allow teachers to use grades perhaps in that most constructive way: as a baseline for conversation. Second, your contributions--even just a few--help reinforce good posts (and writing) and place you as an interested reader/participant.

But the third factor is an inherent function of the class asynchronous communication setting. This environment provides a strong influence that can change--almost always for the better--the written contributions of students. You may see a progression in several areas:

• Editorial cleanness: Students quickly come to recognize that sloppy posting isn't acceptable, and only when they're behind will you see a lot of typos and errors after the first few posts.
  
• Use of evidence: If you want evidence in posts, ask for it. I do, and sometimes it takes a few weeks, but if you keep asking for students to substantiate their arguments, some do, and it catches on for much of the class.
• Length: Students realize short posts aren't acceptable. In fact, they can feel cheated by shirkers.
• Sophistication: The level of the conversation and thinking can increase precipitously in the first few weeks as students see how smart--and interesting--their peers are.

There are certainly downsides we could explore to situations of "virtual social pressure" like this, but for classroom writing and learning, I think we are building a constructive environment. If you want to avoid groupthink, as the teacher you can help not just by rewarding creativity and innovation in the post grades, but by overtly commenting on such posts on the boards themselves. I can tell you that some of my favorite posters were students who took on me and the other students all term.

Now, you can certainly hasten the development of this environment by being involved yourself on the boards, but a lot of this will grow organically (however, if you don't get involved at all, I think you are asking for trouble). Realize that good work in this environment is contagious, and a few hard-working students, sometimes just one, can elevate the course conversation for the rest of the group. Students begin to see the potential, and they go for that higher level not just in their individual writing efforts but in their interactions with each other.

Just how much are they writing online?

One of the main reasons I'm such an advocate of digital environments for writing--especially first-year writing--courses is because, plain and simple, students write so much in these environments. If teachers use asynchronous tools, their courses easily become focused on student texts.

But just how much do students actually write with these asynchronous tools? Last spring, I taught a hybrid first-year course, Analytical Writing & Reading, a literature for composition-type course. Remember, Drexel is on the quarter system, so this was a 10-week course. In this hybrid, my students met once a week, on Tuesdays, and much of their work for the second half of the week took place online, with the bulk of that work being conversations about texts on message boards (in this case, Bb Vista Discussions). I also used the Journal function of Bb Vista Discussions to enable each student to set up a journal; essentially, the Journal function creates a message board thread only viewable by the instructor and the student, and I found it a convenient way to maintain journals.

As a step toward answering the question "how much do students actually write?," I cut-and-pasted all of the message board and journals posts from two students in the course, placed them in a Word file, and then counted the approximate results (making sure to subtract post headers and such). Student 1 wrote 6,800 words in the journal and 8,300 words on the course message boards. Student 2 wrote 9,100 words in the journal and another 9,000 words on the message boards.

Although I know students write a lot in my classes, I was still a bit awed by the amount of writing: These students are writing, again in an environment with all of the advantages I've described in earlier posts, an additional 1,500 to nearly 2,000 words each week on top of their formal projects and other informal assignments.

I want to make a couple comments to accompany these results. One is that this wasn't just a lot of writing; no, this was a lot of high-quality writing. Also, while these two were both certainly good students who were on the high end of the scale in terms of their performance in the course, they were within the "normal" behavior of students in this environment; in other words, this is representative student work in my courses.

1,500 to 2,000 words a week. That's a lot of writing--and that's what I want my writing courses to be about.

How much should you participate in student online conversations?

I am often asked how much I think teachers should participate with message boards and other asynchronous writing environments.

There's not a one-size-fits-all rule, but I say this: You should be involved with the writing your students do in these communication environments.

Some teachers take a hands-off approach. Their reasons may range from the soundly pedagogical--not wanting to commandeer class conversation--to the practical--they have many classes and can't keep up with the conversations.

For sure, there can be a danger to your over-participation in these environments. As George Collison and his co-authors said, you can fall into "Hijacking the Dialogue" (1)--shutting down conversation or dominating it so students have little room to express their own views.

The dialogue among students in asynchronous environments can often be about students' communicating with each other, honing and refining their writing. You can obstruct that with over-involvement. In my classes, though, much of the teaching of the class takes place in these environments. So while I encourage student-centered discussion, I realize I need a voice. After all, I am the teacher. All student posts are not equal: Some of their posts digress, and sometimes they're plain wrong. I need to provide them with the support and guidance they expect from the teacher.

Also, some teachers have impossibly heavy teaching loads, and it may indeed be difficult to be active in all of the conversations taking place. However, if you don't participate much because of the time it takes, I think we need to go back again to comparing your online or hybrid courses with your f2f teaching, not just in terms of what you do, but the time it takes.

No matter how many sections of f2f writing you're teaching, you wouldn't simply show up in your f2f class and sit there silently every class while students talk--no matter how student-centered you are. That sort of "transfer" thinking should apply here to the way you conduct your online classes. Even if you need to set a timer, you should dedicate some of the time you would have spent in an f2f class to participating in your online conversations.

As you know if you read this space, I think a tremendous amount of student-directed writing and learning takes place in asynchronous environments. But if we are completely--or even mostly--absent from these conversations, then a variety of things might happen:

• Students might view the whole exercise as busy work. Disgusted students may even put up nonsense posts or cut-and-paste the same comments from week to week to see if the teacher will catch on.
• The conversation could go off track or, worse, could get nasty. As the teacher, you have a responsibility to create a sense of decorum, much as you would in the classroom.
• As I mentioned, the learning in the class might be compromised. My asynchronous conversations build the learning of the course. I must have hand in shaping that learning.
  

What is the ideal response rate? I have a loose goal--that I do come surprisingly close to hitting each term--of having a quarter of the posts be mine. So about one out of every four posts is from me. This varies significantly. Some threads buzzing along so nicely that my comments would only intrude. Other threads seem to need an every-other post from me.

While some teachers have success with minimal posting, I think we must be mindful of being too hands-off. While moving the teacher away from being the center of all class activity and conversation is a good thing, an absent teacher could breed resentment and frustration among students, short-circuiting the learning goals of the course.

Note:

1) From the great book by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and
Robert Tinker: Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators. Madison: Atwood Publishing, 2000.

My book is now available

I'm excited to announce that my book, Teaching Writing Online: How and Why (NCTE), is now available. Check it out at http://www1.ncte.org/store/books/comp/130888.htm or

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Writing-Online-How-Why/dp/0814152538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245761111&sr=8-1.

Talking literature on message boards

Teaching writing often involves a kind of fluid idea of course content: Often, our "content" can be largely based in the student texts created that term. But we still do teach a lot of what you would otherwise call "content." In fact, if you take a writing about writing/writing studies approach (1), as we do at Drexel, composition and rhetoric research are important components of the curriculum.

And, of course, many compositionists still teach literature (2), and we often teach literature, for lack of a better term, for its own sake.

As you know if you read this space, I am a fan of asynchronous, message board conversations. So what might online conversations about literary works look like online?

First off, know that students can produce high-level work when they converse about literary texts online. To help them, you can create whatever guidelines you wish, including requiring them to quote their texts heavily, helping them build that evidence "muscle."

To start these conversations, prompts should be simple and direct, encouraging text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections (3). Remember when creating prompts that you can interact later with students on the threads. If your goal is for them to build collaboratively their knowledge in the class, then don't give them initial prompts with too many constraints. For instance, create simple prompts around topics like this:

• Ask them if they would agree or disagree with a character's actions or statements. How would they have acted in the same situation?
  
• For poems and short pieces, ask them simply what a work means to them.
• Where there's ambiguity, explain what happened. Sometimes even better, ask them to pose questions about the work.
• Describe the significance of a symbol, action, metaphor, etc.
• Connect one work with another they have read (or with a film, an incident in pop culture, etc.).
• Comment on a particular aspect of a work--such as the setting or plot.
• Analyze a particular quote.
• Link two or more works based on a common theme--especially with poems and short stories--and ask them to comment from there.

These examples all lend themselves to short, one- or two-sentence prompts.

When facilitating literary-based online discussions, there is an important thing to keep in mind: The students have the Web at their fingertips. This could be frustrating, especially if you love to wow them by revealing surprises inherent in works: How many students are stunned that Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" could be about an abortion?

You may be reluctant to lose some of that power. But you can use the students' connectedness to your advantage in several ways. First, you can immediately focus the discussion's energy on higher-level problems raised in texts, the kind of issues that ultimately make literature so satisfying for us to read and discuss. Also, in these conversations students can work on interpretations embedded and developed in their particular class. What can be especially interesting is working on text-to-self connections and having other students respond to those connections. Finally, they can work hard on practicing the challenging skill of incorporating texts--from the literature as well as from each other--expertly in their own posts.

I put this issue of their Web access right out there for them, by the way: I tell them we're going to talk about literary works, and I assume they will use all of the resources available. I just ask them overtly to make sure they cite their sources.

A recent experience in my first-year hybrid class confirmed the power of this environment for discussing literature. After reading Ibsen's A Doll's House, we started our conversation in our onsite meeting and then moved to an online discussion. The final moment of the play, Nora's door slamming, has been widely considered since the play's first production (just check Google if you don't believe me) as a noble, powerful act. Yet one student, several days into the conversation, observed that children are big door-slammers (I live with three of them and can confirm this), so she wondered if Nora's act was a continuation of her childish behavior. The student who expressed this clever alternative view hardly ever spoke in our f2f classes. Not just her comment but the fact that she made it on our message board affirmed for me how students can generate creative thoughts from literature after having some time to think about and reflect on the work, which of course are the basic advantages built into using asynchronous discussions.

Notes:

1) We at Drexel have based our approach on Downs and Wardle's College Composition and Communication article “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’”(58.4, 2007, 552–84) and the many conversations that it spawned.

2) See Anderson and Farris' anthology, Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction (MLA, 2007)

3) I'm borrowing this terminology from Zlotnick Schmidt, Crockett, and Bogarad's literature anthology Legacies (fourth edition)

Drexel's media conversion system

In a March 2008 post, I wrote about using video in online writing (OW) courses. In that post, I briefly mentioned that Drexel has a sophisticated media conversion system that makes it easy for Drexel teachers to use video and other media. Now I want to provide you with more information about Drexel's system. The system, once known as the Rich Media Conversion Project, is now called DragonDrop (Drexel's mascot is a dragon, Mario the Dragon to be exact). This has been a multi-year, continually evolving project involving several iterations of the software and its interface. The system helps teachers create media files and make them available to--or "publish" them for--their students in a variety of formats. (You can learn more about this at http://www.drexel.edu/IRT/rmcweb/, but I'll talk about the basics of it here from my usual perspective, that of the OW teacher.)

With DragonDrop, you can use built-in recording software to create screencapture videos: videos of your computer screen with accompanying audio. You can then upload the video file that you've created via a simple, clean Web interface that allows you to choose file output formats so your students can access the material. Drexel's system creates an accompanying Website automatically that contains the various media files. Students simply navigate there and click. Here is an example: https://rmcp.dcollege.net/playlists.aspx/501/16215/rss. If you click on the video links on that Webpage, you will see two short (<1 href="http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp">http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp). There are other types of software you can use to create screencaptures, and Drexel's system now has a built-in recorder, but I like using Camtasia to record the audio and visual from my laptop.

I "produced" the completed video using the Camtasia software to put it into an .avi audio/video format. Don't get hung up on the concept of "producing": This production process is simple and only takes a few clicks with Camtasia; basically, producing turns the "raw" recorded video into a sharable .avi file.

Next I logged onto Drexel's DragonDrop system using my Drexel userid and password.

Via the Web DragonDrop interface pictured below, I then uploaded the file. The system asked me to name the "playlist," or the name of the Website that would contain the media materials. It then asked me to name the file and to indicate the output, that is, what type of file I wanted my audience to be able to access. Drexel's system gives you multiple output formats for audio and video: 3GPP, Flash Video, MP3, MP4, Real Media, and/or Windows Media Video. I say "and/or" because you can produce your video in multiple formats, as I have done with the example above. You can also briefly describe and tag the file to help with later searches.

I received an automated email from DragonDrop when the files were encoded; the email gave me the Website address above. As I said, Drexel's system automatically creates this Website as a home for the media files. Then, all my students (or you) need to do is go to the URL and click on the files to watch/listen to the media (don't forget, viewers must have the appropriate media software to view the files; sometimes this is a snag with students). I can use the same URL all term for my class, if I choose, adding additional media materials as the term progresses to the same URL "playlist." The media files are "streaming," which basically means that when you click on the files they are continuously downloading as you watch them rather than needing to be downloaded as a large file all at once.

The Drexel DragonDrop system is a beautiful thing, and it significantly simplifies the process of creating and, perhaps even more importantly, distributing media materials to students. This system is also a great example of a partnership between teachers and technology experts. The Drexel IT folks have worked with faculty to make the system as user-friendly as possible, and faculty have found creative ways to use this tool to enhance their courses. I think part of our job as OW teachers is to explore the technologies available and then work with the technical experts on ways of using technology in pedagogically sound ways. We can do some amazing things together that will ultimately benefit the teaching and learning that takes place in our classes.

Students message board moderators

Using student moderators can be another way to expand the communication possibilities of asynchronous tools when you teach online writing courses. Moderators can help build the class dialogue without your having to micromanage each conversation. In addition, for those of you who teach many sections, moderators may help you juggle all of the conversations in your courses each week.

Rita Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson provide a number of examples of learner-led activities (see especially pages 110-19), in which students take the lead in generating conversations and activities in an online class (1). In my class, I start out the term by asking students to sign up for the week they will moderate. I do this by using a message board thread, and they simply have to put their name and the moderation week in the subject line. It's okay if there are multiple moderators in a given week, as I have many different threads each week (as I've mentioned in earlier posts about message boards).

At the beginning of the week, I send each moderator a message like this:

Hi Chris,
I just wanted to touch base with you about moderating for week three, and I want to thank you for signing up for this week.

Please help moderate these two threads: "Analyzing rhetorical effect" and "Visual literacy and immigration." As moderator, please do the following: let everyone know that you'll be moderating the conversation on those threads; keep up with what's being said; and, much like I have during week one, try to move the conversation forward with questions and new ideas. Basically, try to keep things on track.

At the end of the week, I will ask you to write a brief summary (no more than a secondary post) of each thread and post it there. The summary will address what happened on that thread during the course of the conversation.

If you have any questions during the week, let me know, but I think you will get a feel for how this works as the week unfolds.
Thanks,
Prof. Warnock

I basically ask the moderators to keep active in the conversations, which they do quite well, and then to post a summary post on that thread about what transpired in the conversation that week. Everyone gets a turn at moderating, and this moves me out of the role of sole class moderator and all-around big voice of control in the course. In fact, recently in one of my classes there was a good, polemical conversation about illegal immigration, and I was glad not to have to be the only one helping students navigate this material.

I grade the moderator role as a 20-point informal assignment (like a double-strength post in my thousand-point system).

You can take this idea of moderating further. You might also want to explore enabling students to develop the prompts they will moderate. You could also ask students to serve not only as moderators but as evaluators of each other's work. For instance, Katrina Meyer investigated having students rate each other’s posts based on their value to their class. She felt this allowed “both instructors and highly regarded students” to influence how the class proceeds (2).

Finally, and most importantly, students may learn valuable writing and communicating skills by serving as moderators. They may see how challenging it can be to manage a conversation and encourage participation, and their writing authority shifts when they assume the role of moderator, which I think is always an interesting way to help them re-think their writing roles in a course.

Notes:

1) From their book, Engaging the Online Learner (2004).

2) From Meyer's article “Does Feedback Influence Student Postings To Online Discussions?” in The Journal of Educators Online (4.1 [2007]): <http://www.distance-educator.com/dnews/Article15296.phtml>.