August 1998 — Features
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Eight Ways to Get Students More Engaged in Online Conferences
Hypertext conferencing can
support a variety of other student activities (http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/wklemm/instruct.html).
We have built into FORUM the ability for a teacher to create
structured hypertext that helps keep students focused and on task.
The greatest advantage of hypertext is that it allows student groups
to create things (deliverables, such as group-based decisions, plans,
projects, portfolios, case studies, etc.). Those who believe that
constructivist approaches to teaching are important should recognize
that hypertext (hypermedia) systems are much superior to
threaded-topic systems. It is time for the educational community to
look beyond the conventional threading paradigm. If you are one of
those teachers who would like to stop lurking but don't know how,
consider the eight suggestions below.
How to Prevent Lurking
1) Require participation. Don't let it be optional. Set aside a portion of the grade allocation for participation in the online discussions. Tell the students that they must post x-number of items each week or for each topic. Critics will say that this approach d'es nothing to ensure quality of input. But it at least gets the students engaged, and hopefully, once they get caught up in the activity, they will strive to improve the relevance and quality of their work, because now they are on display. No longer can they hide. For many students, it is more embarrassing to make public postings that have no value. As another incentive for quality work, the teacher should grade on quality of the postings. That is highly subjective, but no more so than grading of term papers or essays.
2) Form learning teams. The advantages of so-called cooperative or collaborative learning are abundantly documented. [3-7] Collaborative learning can occur just as well via computer conferencing. [8-10] Moreover, asynchronous conferencing overcomes the schedule-coordination problems that plague typical face-to-face learning teams. The advantage for promoting online interaction is that learning teams should bond and thus make each student in the group want to do his or her share. Helping students learn how to acquire team spirit is important in and of itself, but it also provides students with powerful incentive to become more engaged in online conference activity.
3) Make the activity interesting. If it is a discussion topic, make it one that students have a reason to get engaged in. Appeal to their life experiences, vested interests and ambitions. It might even be a good idea to let the students create some of the topics, especially if you provide an overall academic framework to guide them where you want them to go. If it is a group-created paper or project, let the students pick the subject within the bounds of the academic objectives. Surely, you want more than just "discussion" of student opinions &emdash; a matter discussed in more detail on the topic of academic deliverables.
4) Don't settle for just opinions. Everybody has opinions. They are like knee jerk reflexes, occurring with little thought once they have been formed. Thus, it is not surprising that many classroom discussion groups online are dominated by opinion messages, rather than rigorous analysis and creative thought. Teachers should insist that opinions alone are not sufficient. They must be supported with data and rational discourse and even re-examined in light of what others in the online group are thinking.
