Instrutors must be engaged in small group discussions

Betty Robinson shared a piece from the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT): Using the Online Learning Environment to Develop Real-Life Collaboration and Knowledge-Sharing Skills: A Theoretical Discussion and Framework for Online Course Design by Lisl Zach and Denise E. Agosto. (Emphasis added by Betty and me):

"The most commonly mentioned key instructor behavior was participation/engagement. Students agreed that the more active the instructor was during the course and the more interested she appeared to be in both the topics of study and in student learning, the more they learned. As one student wrote: “[I learned the most when] the instructor engaged with both the individual and groups.” Another wrote that “[The instructor’s] level of engagement in the discussions, including in the small group forum, was invaluable. This is not something every professor attempts, and in my opinion, those classes really suffer.” Students stressed not just the amount of instructor participation in the course but also the quality of instructor interaction with students as key to increasing their learning: “[The instructor’s] attention to interacting with the class on the discussion board [was] outstanding and really [did] make a difference.”

Next, students tied the instructor’s personalization of the course to increasing their own engagement. Personalization methods included the student introduction forum at the beginning of each course, as well as other techniques designed to help students think of their peers and the instructor as real people, despite never meeting them in person. "

As an online instructor for a graduate course on research methods for a college of education, I know how difficult it can be to stay highly engaged in the discussion boards, particularly the first time teaching and then when it starts to get routine. But this is where the students really get to know and "see" YOU, the prof and feel like this is a real course and not a correspondence course nor an independent study.

If you use small groups (which I highly recommend for any class over 10), you don't have to be highly engaged in every group every week. Don't overwhelm yourself trying to do that! Be sure to post at least once a week in every group, and then select 1 or more (depending on the number of groups) each week to spend more time with. Be sure to join in throughout the week, just like you expect the students to do. Posting 5 times in an hour may look like you are active, but students will see it was all at once and feel just like you do when grading students--that's just popping in not active engagement in a discussion over time.

Full abstract:

Previous research has suggested that effective collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills are crucial for successful employment in the modern economy where much professional work is now done in teams. Many of these teams involve participants who are not co-located geographically and who communicate with each other through online media. If current faculty are to prepare students to enter this modern workplace, they must prepare them to succeed at online collaboration and knowledge sharing. This article examines the theoretical basis for using collaborative online learning techniques to teach library and information (LIS) students. It provides examples from a newly-designed three-course online Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management (CI/KM) concentration to demonstrate that the online environment is well suited for developing collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills and to illustrate how a number of collaborative techniques can be used in a real online class to develop a sense of community among students. The examples indicate that collaboration and knowledge sharing, while not always easy to achieve, are fostered in the online learning environment and that students become more comfortable with collaborative techniques over time. The article also presents a framework for online course design that maximizes the benefits of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Divided Attention: Multitasking in the Classroom?

David Glenn has an interesting article in The Chronicle Review, Divided Attention, that summarizes recent (and some far past) research about multitasking and mobile devices, and its effect in the classroom. Nothing dramatically new, but some interesting points are made, particularly at the end:

"One of the deepest questions in this field," Nass says, "is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring—that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay—or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"

I hope in your classes the students aren't averse to the topic at hand! But yet, I find myself jumping to fun apps this all the time now that I have an iPhone (but never at work, of course!). I probably never would have in class, but I can see how easy it would be to use them instead of taking notes or listening to a lecture.

One faculty member completely bans laptops and other devices, including for taking notes. His perspective is that technology makes it so easy to provide materials (notes, outlines, lecture podcasts, etc.) to students before or after class that during class, they should being paying attention to him and to other students. Even taking notes is multitasking.

(If you are a USM instructor, contact CTEL for help providing materials via BlackBoard, podcasting, and other technology options.)