August 1998 — Features
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Eight Ways to Get Students More Engaged in Online Conferences
Limitations of Most Conferencing Software. The typical software for online conferencing is either e-mail Listservs or commercial e-mail organizer systems such as Caucus or First Class. Even when the mail is organized by the commercial software, it is organized in a topic/sub-topic outline format that students can navigate by simple mouse clicking without being intellectually driven by context within the mail messages. To read such threaded-topic messages, no real search strategy is required. And when a student d'es want to stop lurking and contribute, little real thought needs to be given on context or on where to put the message &emdash; just attach it as a mail message to a given topic thread. Also, these systems typically do not contain their own databases for research and resource sharing.
In threaded-topic conferencing, the messages often get posted in chronological order, which is not necessarily the order in which they should be read. For active learning, point and click is not enough. Students certainly don't have to think about how to navigate content; they just point and click on the next message. Such systems make it difficult to keep track of the context in which to add a comment. The comment usually refers to a few words or sentences in the referent note, not the whole note itself. So, very often, we force the others to go read the referent note to understand the context for our note or else cut and paste the relevant portions into our comment. This, and the limited way in which notes can be organized, contributes to a feeling of information overload as the pile of mail messages gets bigger.
Suppose you had a hyperlink-based system that allowed notes to be attached to specific character strings within a document. Then the student would have to think about content and context in deciding what input to provide and where the best place is to put it. Moreover, students could create such in-context links between and among various notes that they did not think to do during the initial submission.
Have you noticed how this kind of software would resemble Web pages? But of course the difference is that everybody gets to share and edit documents and create links. For these reasons, my colleague Jim Snell and I have developed a hypertext-based online conferencing system called FORUM® (copyright, Texas A&M University). Both of us have been using it for four years in our courses as an online adjunct to the regular classroom. FORUM operates similarly to the World Wide Web, except that all students can contribute input to shared pages, and make links from within them, without writing any computer code or mark-up language. We use this environment to engage the students in debates and group decision, to critique each other's work, and for case studies (see http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/vaph451/casestudy.htm).
One of the advantages of hypertext conferencing is that it supports formal debates. There is a formal system for computer-based debates called Issue-Based Information System (IBIS). These early systems have been well researched and provide useful information for anyone serious about using software to support online debates or to track and make decisions.
