Participation
This page provides some guidelines regarding participation in an online course. It includes advice for posting to the discussions, how to effectively play the facilitator and wrapper roles, advice from previous P540 students, and some general thoughts about Netiquette.
Thoughtful Exchange:
Participation in the course discussions goes beyond the frequency or quantity of your contributions to the discussion forum. The thoughtfulness and quality of your postings will be the most important factor. Consider the three posting scenarios below (the last one is what I encourage in this class):
Joe "OK" Student: Joe posts to the forum quite often. In fact, he has posted more times to the forum than any other person in the class. However, his postings are typically quite brief and typically include phrases such as: "good job!," "OK, sounds good to me," and "I agree. . ."
Mary "Summary" Student: Mary is a good student but often doesn't take the time to think critically about the issues that are being discussed in the forum. Her postings in the forum tend to be quite long. They usually summarize ideas that have already been contributed to the discussion without adding any new insight. In fact, because her postings rarely contain any new ideas, most students just skim her contributions and rarely does anyone comment on her posting.
Ann "A" Student: Ann contributes frequently to the course discussion. It is obvious that she has carefully thought about the issues being discussed. Her comments to others postings provide a good critique of their ideas and often take the discussion to the next level by sharing her own perspective. She also is careful not to make blanket generalizations and often uses citations from the literature to back up and support her ideas.
Facilitators and Wrapper Guidelines:
Most students in the P540 course over the 5 years reported that being the facilitator or wrapper was a positive, though challenging, learning experience.
Facilitators. When you are facilitating the discussion, you will be assessed on your ability to ask meaningful questions and involve the rest of the class in a constructive discussion on the given topic. Facilitators are encouraged to post additional thought questions or to encourage them from class members. Initial postings by the instructors are simply to get you started with that week's discussion. The facilitator for the week should post to the discussion no later than the first Tuesday of the unit.
Students from previous years reported using the following strategies in the facilitator role:
- Asking lots of questions to open up the discussion
- Playing devil's advocate by deliberately making contradictory statements to stimulate the discussion (and stating they were playing that role)
- Asking questions based on what students had already posted in order to draw out longer responses.
- Using the discussion questions in the Driscoll book as a starting point
Wrappers. Wrappers are responsible for synthesizing discussions into main points including:
- Main points for this unit
- Things to think about
- Questions for future learning
The synthesis should be posted to the discussion no later than the second Saturday (just before the end) of the unit. That way the synthesis can help class members as they complete the thought activity for the week.
One of the best descriptions of the wrapper role comes from Erping Zhu, an instructor and researcher who uses starter and wrapper roles extensively in her online courses. She writes:
By synthesizing, a wrapper pulls together a discussion, brings it to a closure, links this discussion to prior ones, and builds bridges to the following ones. Instead of repeating or paraphrasing peers' messages, a wrapper would discuss and address part and whole relationship; for example, how to view this week's discussion in relation to the big discussion - learning technology/teaching methods, what questions and concerns emerged and need to be answered.
The wrapping-up activity offers a unique learning opportunity and involves students in exercising various higher level cognitive skills. Those skills are highly valued in the real world and are important in every job and profession. The wrapper's comment is a learning product jointly owned by the wrapper and fellow students. The wrapper benefits from going through the learning process and producing the final comment and fellow students benefit from being aware of the process and reading the final comment. (Erping Zhu, personal communication, November 7, 2001)
One student described what he did in the role of the wrapper:
- Observed the discussions as they unfolded over the one or two weeks, thinking about "how to go about stealing some of the threads,"
- Concentrated on "synthesizing and summarizing."
- Printed the entire content of the forum and highlighted the key ideas on the hard copy
- Pulled out the key ideas, summarizing the direction the discussions went in, then suggested what some of the loose ends or unsolved issues were.
- Mentioned some things that the class might want to think about, "maybe even foreshadowing the next unit a little."
One student even reported that she printed out the wrapper's postings every week because they were good summaries of what had gone on in the discussion.
Other advice from previous P540 students:
There have been extensive evaluations of previous years' online P540 class in order to improve it. A whole team of researchers have asked students what they liked and disliked about the course, what they found most and least useful, and I have incorporated their suggestions about pacing, readings, assignments and group work into this semester's course.
We also asked students what students wished they'd have done differently to improve their learning. Here, we share with you the advice from these students on how to improve the P540 course experience.
- Start earlier on assignments-at least getting some general ideas down to flesh out later
- Start earlier on readings-skimming articles, then reading more in depth
- Post to the discussion earlier in the week-getting something out there early, before the discussion gets too involved and "all the good points are taken"
- Engage in discussion more
- Give course more time in general
- Spend more time researching theories on my own
- Post more questions of peer responses in discussion forum
Netiquette:
Netiquette is an important part of participating meaningfully in an asynchronous discussion forum. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the netiquette guidelines provided in the policy section of the syllabus. It is important to note that netiquette does not mean that you can't be critical of others ideas. In fact, meaningful discussion and debate in the class will require you to critically analyze each others ideas. Netiquette requires that you be conscientious about how you respond to others. Some things that you should consider:
- Don't "flame" other individuals (flaming is being critical of the person posting rather than the ideas - or being harsh in a non-constructive way)
- Try not to always focus on the negative - in addition to being critical, look for the positive in your peers' postings
- Try to stay on target with the topic and don't let your conversation get too far astray
- Try to stay current in the discussions - responding to a discussion forum days or weeks after everyone else has moved on is not very useful
Comments: joalexan@indiana.edu
