Entries Tagged with “discussion board”
How does the feedback you've received match up with your observations and/or expectations for the impact and success of your approach?
Those assessments I think really help me move away from just a global impression, if you will, of what’s going on in the classroom and give me numbers. I’m a scientist by training, and so having numbers, having concrete data to back up what those impressions might be is really, really helpful to me, because I have a sense of what’s working and what’s not working. So for example, I had a sense that the concept check questions were pretty helpful and students were responding positively, [and] then I got some numbers to back that up. I also had a sense, for example, with the discussion boards for the large sections, that those weren’t working as well because of how large the sections are, and how unwieldy that can become.
In fact, when I got the Student Assessment of Learning Gains data on the discussion boards, those numbers were down in the two or three range, rather than up above the four range on those kinds of items. It definitely helped me gather some additional information in a more formal way, doing those kinds of assessments.
Informally again, students have given positive feedback about the concept check questions, not so much about the discussion boards, and so, I think that’s one of the things that happens is you try out different tools, you find what works, what doesn’t work, and I’m very interested in finding out in formal ways what works, rather than some sense of what’s going on in a classroom, and again, numbers-driven, data-driven conclusions are what I’m looking to get. I’m able to do that with some of the tools I’m using.
— Mark Laumakis, Psychology
What features of Blackboard haven't worked for you?
The discussion board! It has not been a motivating tool. Students in all my classes did not feel eager to use it; posting for the discussion thread seemed to be more of a task for them. The online ones preferred live chat rather than asynchronous dialogue. In addition, the assignment tool can be a bit buggy at times. For example, it does not allow me to download the entire submission if one student did not submit their work correctly. Also, I was not able to access blackboard.sdsu.edu while traveling in China. There seem to be some restrictions on our side. Most importantly, Blackboard needs to look into developing powerful features similar to the several emerging social software, Blogs (blogger.com), Moodle (http://moodle.com/), and Wiki. These tools allow students to publish journals, thoughts, and ideas instantly on the web with a few mouse clicks. They also enable authors to express themselves freely and spontaneously while interacting with a large audience, which appears to be a strong motivator. These software programs also inform students of new posts within a community. Blackboard needs to catch up with the trend, developing more powerful communication tools that can support larger-scope online socializing. These tools can facilitate the forming of online communities where students not only share their work, but also life experiences and individual concerns.
— Minjuan Wang, Educational Technology