Online Learning Discussion Styles and Evolution
We looked at a new tool to integrate into our LMS this week, a tool called Yellow Dig. It offered a variety of features, but the one that got us most excited was the potential to dramatically change how online class discussions are held.
Currently, most online classes use a discussion board model, divided by week. It’s what every class I’ve experienced so far in this certificate program has featured. Being relatively new to my job, I’d never heard any complaints, but apparently there was a desire by more than a few faculty to try and create a more organic form of online discussion. I suppose they felt that breaking the discussion by week, with a requirment of so many posts and so many replies per week, felt sort of forced and not really natural. Perfunctory on the part of students, essentially.
What Yellow Dig offers (and I”ve only seen about a 30 minute preview through a remote presentation) was to have one feed, an ongoing discussion if you will. So instead of being divided by week, YD tries to replicate a sort of standard social media experience of having a wall, with posts and comments and threads. YD also allows for self grading- it awards an internal sort of points to students based on the types of posts they do . An original post gets them a maximum of like, let’s say 30 points. A reply gets them 20. The length of the posts also determines how many points they get. They get points for every reply or comment on a post, which is an incentive to create some thought provoking or interesting items to generate conversation. And then students are required to hit a certain amount of these points per week. The amount of points possible within a week is also capped, so a student can’t try to fit in a semeter’s worth of points in one week. The cap allows for some catch up if you fall behind in a week. And what is potentially exciting for faculty is this grading and awarding points is all automated, so a faculty doesn’t have to sit and manually grade the discussions. There’s all sorts of other features and controls for the faculty to change settings and address any issues, but that’s the gist of it.
We kicked it around after the call, where I got more background on where the desire for a product like this was coming from. There was a concern that faculty had been “trained” to create online discussions in the week/module format for so long, that such a paradim shift to something like YD would be difficult. We also discussed where this present weekly discussion board model was generated from. My more senior peers tied it to the way our LMS’s functioned (we use Canvas and had used Blackboard in the past). I saw it as also tied to just how classroom face to face discussions are sort of built, in that you discuss in class that week’s topic and readings, and this was what the current discussion board setup tried to replicate.
I wonder now if it’s also because discussion boards, or bulliten boards, was the major first form of communication on the internet, so when the designers of an LMS were trying to create an online means of communication they just based it on what was known. But I’d say the heyday of the bulletin board was the turn of the millenium, and so definitely now the major means of “static” communcation on the internet is the social media feed/wall. It makes sense that there would be an evolution in this respect.
I remember when I was taking online classes for my Librayr Masters, around 2002, that online classes weren’t asynchronous- it was basically in a chat, at a scheduled time. So on Tuesdays nights, I’d sit in a chat room with the 30 or so other studetns while my Prof copy pasted a lecture, then paused now and again for questions and discussion. That means of online learning tried to wholesale replicate the face to face experience of teaching, but it didn’t work. Oh sure, a webinar here and there is fine in that format, but I definitely think this asynchronous model that arose between then and now is much better and more effective.
Because it is no longer trying to be something else and letting it be what it is. Online learning is not face to face teaching, it has its own strengths and weaknesses. So it’s great that at some point someone figured out that online learning communication should be modeled on the types of communication that worked best on computers (being bulletin boards/discussion), but now that perhaps other means of onlien communication have evolved that are superior, online learning means of discusson should rise to the challenge and evolve, too.
Currently, most online classes use a discussion board model, divided by week. It’s what every class I’ve experienced so far in this certificate program has featured. Being relatively new to my job, I’d never heard any complaints, but apparently there was a desire by more than a few faculty to try and create a more organic form of online discussion. I suppose they felt that breaking the discussion by week, with a requirment of so many posts and so many replies per week, felt sort of forced and not really natural. Perfunctory on the part of students, essentially.
What Yellow Dig offers (and I”ve only seen about a 30 minute preview through a remote presentation) was to have one feed, an ongoing discussion if you will. So instead of being divided by week, YD tries to replicate a sort of standard social media experience of having a wall, with posts and comments and threads. YD also allows for self grading- it awards an internal sort of points to students based on the types of posts they do . An original post gets them a maximum of like, let’s say 30 points. A reply gets them 20. The length of the posts also determines how many points they get. They get points for every reply or comment on a post, which is an incentive to create some thought provoking or interesting items to generate conversation. And then students are required to hit a certain amount of these points per week. The amount of points possible within a week is also capped, so a student can’t try to fit in a semeter’s worth of points in one week. The cap allows for some catch up if you fall behind in a week. And what is potentially exciting for faculty is this grading and awarding points is all automated, so a faculty doesn’t have to sit and manually grade the discussions. There’s all sorts of other features and controls for the faculty to change settings and address any issues, but that’s the gist of it.
We kicked it around after the call, where I got more background on where the desire for a product like this was coming from. There was a concern that faculty had been “trained” to create online discussions in the week/module format for so long, that such a paradim shift to something like YD would be difficult. We also discussed where this present weekly discussion board model was generated from. My more senior peers tied it to the way our LMS’s functioned (we use Canvas and had used Blackboard in the past). I saw it as also tied to just how classroom face to face discussions are sort of built, in that you discuss in class that week’s topic and readings, and this was what the current discussion board setup tried to replicate.
I wonder now if it’s also because discussion boards, or bulliten boards, was the major first form of communication on the internet, so when the designers of an LMS were trying to create an online means of communication they just based it on what was known. But I’d say the heyday of the bulletin board was the turn of the millenium, and so definitely now the major means of “static” communcation on the internet is the social media feed/wall. It makes sense that there would be an evolution in this respect.
I remember when I was taking online classes for my Librayr Masters, around 2002, that online classes weren’t asynchronous- it was basically in a chat, at a scheduled time. So on Tuesdays nights, I’d sit in a chat room with the 30 or so other studetns while my Prof copy pasted a lecture, then paused now and again for questions and discussion. That means of online learning tried to wholesale replicate the face to face experience of teaching, but it didn’t work. Oh sure, a webinar here and there is fine in that format, but I definitely think this asynchronous model that arose between then and now is much better and more effective.
Because it is no longer trying to be something else and letting it be what it is. Online learning is not face to face teaching, it has its own strengths and weaknesses. So it’s great that at some point someone figured out that online learning communication should be modeled on the types of communication that worked best on computers (being bulletin boards/discussion), but now that perhaps other means of onlien communication have evolved that are superior, online learning means of discusson should rise to the challenge and evolve, too.
Great points you make here! I do think though that with the video conferencing technological advances, online learning CAN afford the same experiences as face to face IF set up correctly WITH the correct technology for those who do not want to drive or physically can't go somewhere and still want that "face to face" interaction. I am not referring to online synchronous classes where a professor delivers a presentation one way with a class of students either. I am referring to a dynamic videos being shared, break out rooms, various discussions that come back to full class discussion.s
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