What does a successful online classroom look like?
What works best for writing courses?
How can you create meaningful group work online?
How to provide lecture/lesson delivery online?
How to create student evaluations online (testing/quizzes?)
How to providing feedback to composition students online
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Links
Do you have any Webquest or Web pages that you find particularly helpful in your online classroom?
I thought it might be useful to compile some links that we use in our classrooms, as well as some we use for our own teaching and development of the online classroom for inclusing in a Online Teaching Handbook.
(I'll post some shortly!)
Elli
Group Work
One thing a professor can do in CE6 that I liked is create custom groups. This worked perfectly with my class, which I break into writing groups. All I did was duplicate the writing groups I had created manually inside the CE6 environment. Once you've got that, you can create special group-only discussion areas that facilitate group communication. What I found is that certain groups (not all) liked to use these areas to gossip amongst themselves. It helped to promote group unity.
Group Work Failures
I love the group work in my hybrid classes, but I do have an issue and I was wondering how you all handled this. Sometimes in a group, one person won't do anything. I have them write self-evaluations, and I have no problem giving people a lower grade. But in one group this semester, two of four were doing nothing, and the other two we're not communicating with one another. So one of the students posted their group project without telling anyone else. I'm not sure how to handle that.
In another group, they were done, and they sent the project to one member of the group for her to add things and then post it, but she never posted it, and no one else in the group bothered checking. I'm not sure how to handle this either. The rest of the members of the group told me yesterday that there is a project somewhere in the internet, but no one has sent it to me.
Doug
I've only ever had one group
I've only ever had one group completely implode. (That's a story for another time.) I have had several groups with "do-nothing" members. Basically, I have a two-tiered approach. First, I turn it back on the group. I tell them that it's a group assignment, and that all group members need to participate. As a result, it's in their best interest to ensure that every group member does their share. If they act on this, and make what I see as a sincere attempt to reintegrate the do-nothing member and still fail, then it becomes that member's problem. Aside from the one group I mentioned, I haven't really had any problems. Every so often a group member will "drop out", so to speak, but everyone knows going in what specific portions of their grade are affected, and that the consequences are rather severe, and that there's a mandatory anonymous group evaluation at the end. As a result, I pretty much hear about everything, and it runs smoothly, albeit not in an ideal fashion. (100% involvement 100% of the time is the goal, of course.)
Feedback
I've always given students written feedback on their work, and those that read it (should always be 100%, but there are unfortunate exceptions) find this to be one of the most valuable aspects of my course. When I switched to a 100% online work environment (even in the hybrid class, the only written work they did was the midterm), I kept giving comments, but would use either MS Word's or NeoOffice's comment feature (or Pages, for my lone Mac user). I really liked this, but there were two cons: (1) It took a long time; and (2) there were compatibility issues. (Completely ridiculous, by the way. I'd save it as a .doc file, and Vista users couldn't see the comments... I'd save it as .docx, and, of course, only Vista users could see them, but not all of them.) A solution to (2) is to make everything a .pdf, but that just adds to (1).
A possible solution to (1) that I liked was Mark's idea of recording audio feedback. This could be done in one of two ways: recording while reading, or recording after the fact. Recording while reading will probably be the easiest, but that will lead to a number of pauses while recording. Recording after the fact should work fine, but it might require note-taking. If you record while reading, I recommend using Audacity. It's not only a handy (and free!) audio editor, but it allows you to easily cut blocks of time. It'd take a few seconds per recording, but it wouldn't be hard to go through the file and cut out blocks of white noise. Afterwards, files can be easily exported as .mp3's. For post-reading recording, I'll bet it gets easier with practice.
Another option I've heard of, but never tried, is to give in-class feedback only. I've seen this implemented a couple of ways. One way is to write up a list of common issues/comments, assign them numbers, and then put the numbers on papers. This might translate well to an online environment. Another way is to read the papers and take personal notes, but not mark the papers. In order to understand why students got the grade they did, they would have to attend class. I'm ambivalent about this, because, on the one hand, it would motivate students to come to class (or additionally motivate, shall we say), but on the other, class time is precious, especially in a hybrid. This might take more class time than it's worth.
Feedback on drafts and final copies
For my online courses, I also provide feedback on papers using Word. I haven't had too many problems with format (Vista vs Word, etc., but I do make sure all students are using some version of Word before we begin - Notepad won't work!).
To help ensure students actually read and work with the feedback I make on drafts, I require students to include the commented draft with their final paper. In other words, they are actually typing their final draft "above" their returned draft in the document (when I open their document their final is first and behind their Works Cited is the full text of their draft - no trees are harmed since they are uploading/emailing the paper).
I find that more students are reading and responding to my comments (correcting them in their final copy) by being forced to attach them. That way when I grade the final papers, if I see they did not attend to a previous issue, I don't have to rewrite the same comments but simply say "refer to draft comments", showing them that more careful consideration of comments could result in a better final product.
For my hybrid courses, students must print out and turn in all large papers in class. I find it too tedious to do ALL my grading online and reserve it ONLY for my 100% online courses.
Online evaluations
Since my hybrid and fully online courses have all been English 100, I don't routinly give "tests" - I consider (and tell my students) that the major essays and in class essays are where there are being "tested".
However, I do include small (usually under 20 questions) quizzes online that are required, covering some critical thinking concepts, mla formatting or sometimes some "grammatical" puzzles. These are not weighted heavily and in fact students can take them as many times as they want before the deadline. They've often told me that the process of taking the quiz forced them to learn better than studying for it did.
My hybrid courses always have inclass essays as a way of evaluation (and identifying student writing), and in fact for my hybrid courses, students actually turn in all their major essays in class. Grading online tends to be a little clunky if you're using CE6!