How to get students to participate in Online Discussions… Using Piazza to Encourage Interaction. [This is a guest post by Abir Qasem, who teaches intro to programming, AI, cloud, and device programming courses for the Computer Science Department at Bridgewater College. You can find him online or follow him on Twitter at @abirqasem. --@JBJ] In my introductory programming courses, my pedagogy relies heavily on collaborative problem solving during class time. A big challenge for me, until recently, had been getting the “quiet” students in my class to participate in class discussions. (Judging by the ProfHacker archives, I am not alone!) In my introductory programming courses, my pedagogy relies heavily on collaborative problem solving during class time.
It took a lot of time, effort and creativity for me to get the whole class “talking. Piazza is a Web 2.0 tool that allows students to ask questions and engage in dialogue on the Internet with the professor and with each other. Click for full size. Piazza captures class statistics, which can be interesting (see screenshot for “posts” vs. Harvard Education Letter. Students in Hayley Dupuy’s sixth-grade science class at the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., are beginning a unit on plate tectonics.
In small groups, they are producing their own questions, quickly, one after another: What are plate tectonics? How fast do plates move? Why do plates move? Do plates affect temperature? What animals can sense the plates moving? They raise questions “that we never would have thought of if we started to answer the first question we asked,” says one of the students. Far from Palo Alto, in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Mass., Sharif Muhammad’s students at the Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA) have a strikingly similar experience. These two students—one in Palo Alto, the other in Roxbury—are discovering something that may seem obvious: When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own.
Building An Online Learning Community by Kevin Wilcoxon. “One thing is certain, learning communities are more engaging and members more engaged than is the case with traditional instruction.” How can an instructional designer (ID) leverage social interaction online to engage learners, increase exchange and dialogue, and get better results, without losing the purposeful focus provided by an instructor or traditional course content and structure? Many IDs are intrigued by the potential of communal experiences online, but there is a great deal of uncertainty about how to proceed. Here are a couple of cases that you may find interesting. Afterward, I offer a roadmap for producing similar results. Online Statistics course Michelle Everson teaches a Statistics course online. At the beginning of each cohort, she assigns students to asynchronous discussion groups of five members each. Each group is required to work on eight small-group assignments during the course or series.
Online Operations Management course Learning communities Figure 1. Figure 2. 07_Connecting_Wired_Generation_Dixson.