Getting more out of your course chat, especially with student moderators

We're almost all teaching online, and many of us are in remote synchronous situations, using platforms ranging from Bb Collaborate Ultra to Zoom to Microsoft Teams.

We've faced challenges teaching in these environments, especially back in the spring when we all scrambled through "emergency remote" scenarios, with students who had expected onsite courses suddenly being faced with online learning.

Participation is one major obstacle. I have worked with faculty from institutions around the country, and many have expressed how difficult they have found it to cultivate the conversations they were accustomed to in their years of onsite teaching. They describe being faced with a student presence that consists of black rectangles with names in them. It can indeed be tough.

Like many teachers, I don't think it's appropriate to require students to turn on their cameras. They may not want their environments to be seen. I get it. Also, some of them are mic shy and are reluctant voice participants.

But I do say that if they don't have their cameras on and are unwilling to participate by voice, then they need to participate by using the chat, typing their questions and thoughts.

As a result, my classes often have lots of chat activity. Good things happen in that space, with students posing thought-provoking questions and responses and often supporting each other with the kind of brief messages that characterize digital writing spaces.

For teachers, the chat can be daunting. It can take some skill and patience to manage the messages that are popping up simultaneously with spoken conversations.

To help with this, I strongly recommend the use of student chat moderators. These student moderators have become a key part of the participation element of my synchronous online courses.

At the beginning of the term, I ask each student to sign up for a class period to moderate. I email moderators instructions the Friday of the week before their assigned day:

Hi Alex and Jasmine,

Thank you for signing up to be our chat moderators next week.

This is not a difficult task, as you have seen. Synchronous class moderators will simply help me keep an eye on the chat stream during that class session. Please do the following:

• Pay extra attention to the posts in the chat.
• When a post appears, announce it to me and the class. Please do not worry about interrupting me!
• I can take it from there, but you are more than welcome to comment on the post.

If you like, you can put a post or two on the chat to stimulate conversation.

My thought in assigning chat moderators is that there can be lots of activity in the chat. Sometimes, though, it’s pretty quiet—if it’s quiet, that of course is no reflection on you!

This is low-stakes work that will receive a low-stakes writing grade.

Don’t hesitate to contact me with questions,
Prof. Warnock

First, moderators add a level of participation simply because someone other than me, the teacher, has a regular voice presence in the class. As you can see, I encourage the moderator to interrupt me by reading or summarizing chat messages.

Second, the moderator, by their presence, appears to encourage conversation. None of them wants to get stuck in a "lonely" chat room, so they help each other out! Also, I get the sense that they enjoy hearing their messages being read or summarized by the moderator.

Third, I think moderating is a good skill for them to practice. They will certainly be working--and playing--in remote-type environments for the rest of their lives.

Finally, note that I grade the chat moderating. It's a low-stakes writing grade, and all I ask is that they engage to receive full credit.

When you first encourage chatting, it can be a little overwhelming, but I have seen so much good writing and thinking in the chats that I wonder if I should carry this over to my onsite courses, perhaps even projecting on the wall a running commentary about the spoken discussion that they can add to via the devices they all bring to class anyway.

The course chat provides a good way to get students who might not otherwise do so to participate in your courses. Using student moderators to help you manage these conversations provides a number of additional learning advantages.

Annotate PRO for responding to student message board posts

Annotate PRO is a tool, developed by 11trees, that helps teachers streamline response to student writing by providing a library of common comments that they can easily insert into writing projects.

The Annotate PRO site asks teachers, "Do you ever feel like you say the same thing over and over again to students?" While acknowledging that of course teaching often involves repetition, the site asks what would happen if teachers could streamline that process when responding to student writing, thus putting more energy into deeper feedback and teaching. A series of screenshots show how to use Annotate PRO:

• Once downloaded as a Chrome Extension, Annotate PRO appears as a sidebar.
• Users simply click anywhere that feedback can be provided within a browser: "Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, Gmail – just about anywhere you can type feedback into a webpage."
• From there, users add a comment.
• Groups of comments can be saved to create personal, program, or even institutional libraries.

Annotate PRO allows for "smart automation." Teachers can use it to reduce repetitive keystrokes, but they can customize it using a "Free Form Comment" function that pops up in sidebar when using the tool.

Annotate PRO has great functionality for helping teachers respond to digital papers, and, I suppose, such is still the traditional framework of teacher writing feedback: A teacher giving feedback to a student essay/report/paper. 11trees provides a video description of this core use here.

However, I want to focus on another aspect of Annotate PRO: Its use in developing a library of responses for electronic forums like discussion boards.

As I have written about numerous times, a large component of student writing, and not just in OWCs, involves short, informal writing on electronic platforms. In many courses, students compose most of their words in these environments.

Teachers want to encourage this, but how do they respond/moderate in ways that are helpful for student learning? I've come across and written about a number of strategies--a favorite source is the book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and Robert Tinker--and I think Annotate PRO is a smart tool that offers another possibility.

With Annotate PRO, after installation, I simply opened a Discussion in Blackboard Learn (my LMS) and clicked in a message. Voila! I could instantly drop in a comment that had been stored in a library.

It was impressive and powerful in its simplicity, and I saw immediately how Annotate PRO reduces the literal keystrokes and would free up time for for more substantive teaching. Library comments could help me with the frequent encouragement and questioning posts while I used "Free Form Comments" for more specific moderating and commenting posts.

A common--and, at times, legitimate--complaint from students is that they feel no presence from their teachers on discussions. Teachers are seeking strategies and pedagogies to work more fully and carefully with students in discussion environments. (The Community of Inquiry framework [1] offers a way to think about teacher presence.) Annotate PRO provides them with a technology to help them do that.

Note
1) As described by Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher educationmodel. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Things both great and small in synchronous online writing courses

I teach my online writing courses (OWCs) asynchronously, with only touches of synchronous elements, such as a first-week meeting (that I also record for those who can't attend). I have long discussed the reasons why I teach this way, including because in an asynchronous writing course, everything students do is in writing.

Our field, however, is giving increasing attention to the possibilities of synchronous courses. I recently had the pleasure of serving as a member of the dissertation committee of Kimberly Fahle of Old Dominion University, whose dissertation, "Collaboration and Community in Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (SVCs)" explored a number of fascinating elements about learner experiences in asynchronous courses.

Fahle, who successfully defended earlier this year and is now the writing center director at York College of Pennsylvania, raises several major considerations and observations about SVCs, including some underlying reasons for students’ general reticence for verbal participation when compared with textual communication, the need for modality-specific training, and the general impact of interfaces on learning and teaching.

These major conclusions aside, one of the many strengths of her excellent dissertation was her exploration, through discourse analysis, of detailed aspects of learning in synchronous, online meeting-based environments.

I'll give you a great example. With regard to interface, Fahle wrote that students were sometimes reluctant to speak in class because in the web meeting app for their courses, the face of the last person who spoke would stay prominently on screen until someone else spoke. One of her students said, "I think also the fact that the last person to speak [...] the camera stays on them until someone else speaks [...] makes people maybe not want to speak."

Think about this in terms of an onsite class. It would be like when someone speaks, everyone turns to look at that person, staring zombie-like, until someone else takes the initiative to speak. You could see how that would stifle class dialogue and likely course community.

Through her students, Fahle highlighted such an interesting, and easy-to-overlook, observation. When you consider such a dynamic, you can see how for many students this would be challenging and for shy students possibly withering and debilitating. It also demonstrates how a web platform suitable for business-type meetings might operate in totally different way for education, particularly in courses aiming for discussion--such as an OWC.

Addressing concerns similar to this would take some serious user-centric consideration. As we further explore SVCs and any technologically-faciliated environments, these are exactly the kind of details, from the student eyes, that we need to consider.

Accessibility in your OWC -- and a tool for Blackboard users

Recently, a good friend and colleague visited my office to discuss a problem she was having with an upcoming online writing course she was to teach. Our institution's Disability Office was asking her to verify that her course was accessible.

While course accessibility is not only a key function of that office but an obligation of institutions and teachers, the problem was a disjunction between the way Disability wanted to examine/confirm accessibility and the way her teaching materials were designed.

The disjunction had several causes, and primary was the expectations of course "evaluators" and the course design/pedagogy of an online writing course.

Disability asked my friend, repeatedly, to deliver "documents" to them so those "documents" could be reviewed for accessibility.

But in an OWC, class artifacts often don't exist as discrete, file-like content to be delivered to students or others, especially if the course is well designed in conjunction with the LMS, in our case Blackboard Learn. That's just not the way many of us work. We don't lecture through slides. We don't provide canned modules. Courses are built dynamically around student written dialogues.

So, in my friend's class, many of her materials were embedded in or incorporated into the course interface, making it impossible to package and "send" them to someone to review. In looking at these materials, I found they were indeed well woven into the LMS.

So what was she to do?

Well, aside from our conversations, she went to our IT department. As I've mentioned to anyone I can, we have great IT support. They introduced her to Blackboard Ally, which, according to Blackboard's site, "is a revolutionary product that integrates seamlessly into the Learning Management System and focuses on making digital course content more accessible."

Ally is indeed an interesting accessibility product. It provides an "accessibility percentage" next to the artifacts and components of a course, and in many cases it includes helpful detail when items are not 100% accessible as to why, from uncaptioned images to tables without headers to the absence of ALT-text.

Some will especially love Ally's interface, as the use of percentages kind of gamifies the process: You can continue to "up" your percentage by uncovering and then addressing the accessibility obstacles in your course.

With Ally, my friend was able to verify the accessibility of her course. There was still a bit of a frustration, though, as Disability wasn't in clear contact with IT: This made me realize that Disability offices need to understand the kinds of on-campus tools that can help create accessible courses.

In the end it worked out well: She was able to help Disability understand there was a new tool to help with accessibility. Most importantly, she was able to offer an accessible OWC for her students -- while learning about a new tool that she can use proactively in the future.

How well do we know them?

How well will we know the students in our online and hybrid courses?

Teachers often express this concern to me. Will they be able to achieve the same level of community, perceived or real, as they do with students in onsite courses? Will students' interactions with them feel the same? How about students' interactions with each other? In the future, will they recognize and remember these students? What replaces the experience of knowing that takes shape when students sit in front of them day after day?

At the end of my hybrid FYW course last term, one of the course's solid students, Gabriella, made this provocative comment on the course discussion boards: "After this term I feel like I know people's names, values & viewpoints but I truly do not know them because of our 'cyber-interactions.'"

As I mentioned in a subsequent exchange on the boards, this fascinating comment prompted some serious thinking and reflection on my part.

On the one hand, the trifecta of "names, values & viewpoints" seemed to represent a very successful construction of a learning community in the course.

After all, in most onsite classes, students only know a few of their classmates' names -- in fact, I'm struck by how many students come to our writing center and can't even provide their professor's name! Add to this the knowing of "values & viewpoints," and it would seem that our course developed a level of intellectual familiarity that surpasses onsite learning, except perhaps in small, advanced seminars.

However, Gabriella's comment demonstrates that despite how well she felt she became acquainted with her classmates, she still did not "know them because of our 'cyber-interactions.'"

So, at the end of the term, she was torn: She had, in a hybrid modality, interacted with students both in class and in tiered, rich discussion boards. She knew important things about their thinking. She knew what they stood for. But, for her, "cyber-interactions" still got in the way.
 
I mean, how well do I know them? I feel I do know my OWC students well. I even glanced at the folder containing the scores of recommendation letters I've written, and I notice that I have written many letters for students I encountered only in hybrid and fully online settings.

Yet, this brief, provocative comment by this smart student makes me realize we must continue to overcome the barriers that digital learning poses for our students. Part of that, perhaps, is that we must find ways to help students and teachers recognize that they are in fact already seeing around those barriers.

Inside the node

Researchers in many fields have been studying and mapping networked interactions among groups and individuals, particularly in social media spaces. But I believe no one is better equipped than those of us in OWI in general and composition specifically to study what happens in the nodes themselves. Yes, there is so much in the node for us.

My co-author Diana Gasiewski and I have just submitted to NCTE the final manuscript of our book "Writing Together: Ten Weeks Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course" (more about that very soon). For some of the weeks in the OWC we describe in the book, we provide simple maps of course discussion threads to give readers a glimpse of those interactions -- and how they became more involved as the course progressed. Here is a blown-up piece of one thread:

Many fields, e.g., computer science or sociology or communications, have provided fascinating insights into the black squiggly lines -- how (and sometimes why) entities interact and connect in webs of networks. Software tools have been developed to do this mapping, even do-it-yourself apps like NodeXL (1). Through these analyses, we can see how individuals behave in networked settings, whether it is dozens of students in a class or hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter.

But while comp/rhet folks are also interested in these webs of interaction, we are also uniquely equipped to look within the nodes, as, for us, each contains the artifact we study best: writing (or multimedia).

We can complement and augment the work in other fields that investigates these network maps by describing what happens within these nodes in the context of the overall environment, essentially using our field's tools of inquiry.

I think this gives us a tremendous niche from which to work. Analyzing the links and spaces between nodes is valuable for sure; it shows us in new ways how human beings interact. But in the node, in the node we may find out what we’re thinking, and how specifically that thinking inspired the response -- or the leap to the next node.

Note:

1) See https://nodexl.codeplex.com/