Standards for Student Participation
From ElateWiki
"Participation" stands in for attendance in many online courses. This approach is to deter people from just logging in and not participating in the session (until they’re logged off 20 – 30 minutes in for non-activity and for security). This approach is considered more fair as an assessment, and it is also more effective in terms of learning.
Two Types of Student Participation
There are two general types of student participation in online courses. The more typical understanding involves “interactivity”—or a range of intercommunications and collaborative work that students may engage in to enhance each other’s learning. The less typical understanding involves various activities in a course that may not involve engaging with other students.
Pedagogical Rationales for Student Participation in Online Learning
Theoretically, student interactivity enhances the learning in terms of constructivism, particularly social constructivism. This theory suggests that people co-create meaning through interactivity, and their shared work may result in new learning and the creation of new knowledge. There is a benefit of students collaboratively “reasoning, explaining or ‘arguing’” about the course material” for mutual deeper learning (Larusson & Alterman, 2009, p. 4093).
So-called “contributing student pedagogy” emphasizes the importance of a distribution of power in an online classroom around students in order to support student contribution to the learning of others and to value peer contributions. Ultimately, this suggests the evolution to the building of learning communities through “educational interaction” (Hamer, Cutts, Jackova, Luxton-Reilly, McCartney, Purchase, Riedesel, Saeli, Sanders, & Sheard, 2008, p. 195). For learning communities to thrive, these have to support the motivations of the various participants.
Members participate in a community for different reasons. MacAulay, Keeling, McGoldrick, Dafoulas, Kalaitzakis, and Keeling [6] found three types of needs: information access, professional interaction, and social support and involvement. Leimeister, Sidiras, and Krcmar [4] and Parameswaran and Whinston [7] further identify accumulating social capital in the form of social status and self-expression in a public forum as the other two types of motivation. However, to attract participation, Lin [5] notes that it is important that members have “favorable perceptions of the virtual community’s usefulness and ease of use, as well as the trust concept, are important in increasing usability in virtual community environments” (Baker, Chmura, & Chow, 2008, p. 40).
Such collaborative projects are often used for “divergent” learning in terms of projects that relate to trouble-shooting and problem-solving and creativity. Such learning focuses on fostering inquiry, a broadening of learner experiences (beyond what the individual faculty member may provide), and the exposure to a range of perspectives (and global experiences). Student Retention: Practically, student participation is important for several reasons. For retention purposes, student engagements with each other encourage their stick-to-it-iveness in online courses. Participation humanizes students and the instructor to each other.
Why Assess Student Participation?
Participation gives the faculty member multiple points at which to assess learners and to understand the developmental trajectory of each student’s learning. The assessment of student participation in an online course achieves several things:
1) It sets expectations and competencies for learners. (formative evaluation)
2) Assessment standards set a culture and tone of civility and safety for the learning, particularly in courses where the topics may be controversial or contested. (formative evaluation)
3) It defines the standards by which faculty will assess student work. (summative evaluation)
4) It improves the quality of interactions and activities and mutual learning in an online course. (formative evaluation)
Good to see a tlaent at work. I cant match that.
What May be Assessed?
The design of the assessments for student participation tie clearly to the pedagogical learning objectives…and the instructor’s methods to achieve that learning. Given the variety of subject matters and approaches to online learning, a wide range of factors may be assessed in terms of student participation in an online course.
General Assessment Standards: Assessments need to be culturally neutral and fair. They should promote healthy learning. They should also align with the values of the field.
General Discernments: A sense of contribution to the greater learning of the class is a common focus. Are the students’ postings relevant? Do the students interact well with peers? Do the students focus and stay on topic? Do they differentiate well between what is public and private, what is important and what is TMI (too much information)? Do students regularly contribute postings each week? Do they show evidence of main concepts? Do they accurately cite their sources of factual information? Do they constructively respond to others? Do they express their ideas concisely? Do they edit their work for correct grammar and syntax? Do they show respect to their peers and instructor?
General Conduct and Presentation
Telepresence and Social Presence: How students portray themselves and their identities singly and how they portray as a group are important elements in virtual collaborations.
Learning Value
Research and Presentations: “Jigsaw” methods of teaching and learning distribute the responsibility for the teaching and learning to the students, who capture learning in groups and then share their knowledge with their peers. They may create presentations for their peers which have to be effective and accurate.
Fidelity of Role-Playing Simulations: Online students may be assigned to play particular roles in a historical, legal, sociological, anthropological, or other event. Their depth of preparation, the substantive analysis, and the interactions in the role plays may be assessed. Some of these occur in virtual worlds like Second Life. Here, students interact through their avatars in 3D immersive environments.
Student-Created Assignments / Telementoring / Tutoring: Another type of collaboration involves the creation of student-created assignments for each other and for themselves. This has students working collaboratively in tutoring each other. This is also an example of distributed power. Students may also create assessments for themselves and each other—through collaboration—such as self-created contents for midterms or other types of assessments.
Online Lab Work
Digital Labs: The quality of digital lab work depends on how well students collaborate to achieve the lab aims. The quality of the lab journals (whether individual or group) also matter.
Remote Lab Work: Remote labs are physical labs that students may access through Web-based interfaces to control the machines and so on…and those have to do with the fidelity of the learning and the conclusions drawn from observations. Because of the expense of such labs, these are often also done in groups.
Student Design Work
Co-Design: The quality of student paired or group work around creative collaborations would be emphasized in various design projects—in fields such as landscape architecture, art, architecture, graphic design, computer science, and engineering. The design may be done in 3D spaces and involve 3D objects. Others may be software programs or games that have to work for the designed aim. Or these may be portfolio contents for a business branding of a real or ersatz company or organization.
Good point. I hadn't thghout about it quite that way. :)
Interactivity / Activity Technologies
• Immersive virtual worlds (synthetic worlds)
• Learning / course management systems (L/CMSes)
• Wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies
• Remote laboratories
• Web-based simulations and laboratories
• Email, electronic mailing lists
• Telephone, group telephone conversations
Instructor Coordination / Facilitation Activities
• Structuring communications spaces and designing helpful assignments
• Setting standards with culture, student pledges, team charters (for how they’ll solve teaming challenges) and team logs (for record-keeping of individual participation in a team)
• Integrating assignments
• Differentiating between asynchronous and synchronous activities
• The creation of digital prompts
• The setting of due dates
• The setting up of assignments
One source explains the value of informal communications: “Asynchronous discussions facilitate interaction. Students participate at least twice on weekly topics that are chosen carefully for timeliness, relevance, propensity for lively debate and open-endedness. Responses are graded and require substantiation, documentation, external research and citation. Non-graded discussion areas are used to ensure the successful building of learning communities. Social lounges, virtual mixers, and introductory “games” all help to create and sustain student communities that enhance satisfaction (Nelson, Bhagyavati, Miles, Settle, Shaffer, Watts, & Webber, 2005, p. 225).
Some other “takeaways” follow:
• Interactivity and activity co-occur and should be complementary
• Informal, unstructured and back-channel communications are important for the formulation of a learning community
Forms of Online Student Participation Assessments
The types of student assessments may be set up using a variety of formats. These involve the following: rubrics, forms, grade sheets or scoring sheets, eportfolio evaluations, textual feedback, automated feedback, and other types. These may combine feedback from professionals in the field, the instructor, tutors / facilitators, and peers.
Types of Online Student Participation Digital Contents
A range of digital artifacts that students post in an online course to show participation (both interactivity and activity) involve the following: textual posts, image posts, videos, audio files, slideshows, papers, research, 3D objects, and specialized domain-specific contents.
And I thought I was the sensible one. Thanks for setting me sartight.
See Also
References
Baker, K.A., Chmura, A., & Chow, T. (2008). Virtual community of interest at Capella University. In the proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education (SIGITE 2008): Cincinnati, Ohio. 39 – 44.
Dool, R. (2010). Managing conflict in online multi-cultural student teams. International Online Conference: Chicago, Illinois. Retrieved Mar. 18 – 19, 2010, from http://www.internationalonlineconference.org/.
Hamer, J., Cutts, Q., Jackova, J., Luxton-Reilly, A., McCartney, R., Purchase, H., Riedesel, C., Saeli, M., Sanders, K., & Sheard, J. (2008). Contributing student pedagogy. Inroads—SIGCSE Bulletin: 40(4), 194 – 212.
Koskinen, J.A. & Kelo, T.O. (2009). Pure e-learning course in information security. In the proceedings of the International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN ’09): North Cyprus, Turkey. 8 – 13.
Larusson, J.A. & Alterman, R. (2009). Visualizing student activity in a wiki-mediated co-blogging exercise. In the proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors (CHI 2009): Boston, Massachusetts. 4093 – 4098.
Nelson, M., Bhagyavati, Miles, G., Settle, A., Shaffer, D., Watts, J., & Webber, R.P. (2005). Online teaching practices (both best and worst). Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. 223 – 230.