The other day someone asked me to provide an example of my “online teaching.” I explained some of the online assignments I’ve given, but the person continued, “No, I mean teaching.” It took me a few seconds to comprehend the question, that she was asking if I put my lectures online, or annotated videos. I still probably had a deer in the headlights look. You see, I don’t lecture. I consider that I’m engaging with students in instructional conversations.
Please see my earlier posts about learning through discussion, and also the rest of the category College teaching.
This past semester I have had conversations with students about their experiences with online courses. I was surprised to hear that they thought the discussion board assignments were busywork. Since I have used discussion boards quite extensively in the past, I was intrigued by this comment. When I pressed a little more, they said they did not write what they really think, but what they thought the instructor was looking for.
This has caused me to pause before such an assignment. This semester I asked students to upload concept maps to the discussion boards, but I must say it has not been as productive as I hoped.
In the past, I assigned discussion board postings, and students would always want to know how long it had to be. I settled on 300 words. Then I noticed that students were copying lengthy quotes into their postings. I had to forbid quotes longer than 10 words, and no more than one quote per posting. However, it seems to me I have to find a better way to design discussion boards so that students understand them as learning conversations.
I think the deeper issue is that students don’t understand discussion as being a way to learn. I just had an experience of this last week when I visited a student teacher in a 7th grade classroom, which will be the subject of my next post. I again refer you to the blog of December 2010, when I started writing about learning through discussion.