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Goals for these ARQ workshops
When a course relies even in part on
discussion or collaboration, the learning of every
student is diminished when any student doesn't take part
in the collaboration. The goal of this workshop is to
help faculty members
learn how to discover and then lower barriers that
limit or prevent the full participation of some of their
students. The method: a quick survey of your students.
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The "big idea": Many people assume that, when gathering
feedback or doing research, a large problem (symptom)
must have a single, large cause; therefore (they assume) a problem that faces
only one or two students must be unimportant.
That's not always so. sometimes 20 people can have the
same symptom (in this case, inadequate participation
online), but each one for a different reason. So, to
deal with one symptom, may require helping different
people in different ways. Fortunately, sometimes,
simply discovering the problem is more than half the
effort needed to solve it.
Preparation for
workshop facilitator:
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Read this
brief chapter of the Flashlight Evaluation Handbook.
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If you haven't done so already, do
the workshop for yourself. Experiment
with the Flashlight template in a course you teach (or
do an imaginary experiment if you don't currently teach
a course). What items would you
use? Why? When?
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How much need is there for this
workshop? Because the workshop is
so short, and so easy to run, you can offer it to only a
handful of faculty. But it might be worth finding out
just how much need there is. Survey academic staff at your department
or institution,
asking them a) whether they assign online
discussions or teamwork, b) if so, what participation rates are
typical, and
c) whether they'd like help in increasing and improving
student participation. You could also ask what
department the respondent is in, and then offer your
first workshops for departments where the desire for
assistance is greatest. A template for asking such
questions is available in Flashlight Online (template
ZS69367). And here's a
pdf of such a
survey. You can do this as a separate survey,
or include questions like these in a longer needs
assessment survey for faculty support.
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Decide the schedule. If people
are willing to spend the time, you could do Tasks 1-5 in
one session (30-45 minutes). Or you could split them
into two or more session (e.g., tasks 1-3 in one
session, then task 4 and 5 as one or two more sessions). The individual tasks take 5-15 minutes each. The
more people in your group, the longer it takes to do a
task, usually.
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Prepare paper handouts for participants
(PDF for Task 3).
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Optional: If your institution is not a
Comprehensive or Network subscriber, you may want to copy the template questions into another
survey system that your colleagues use so that they can
experiment on their own as soon as your workshop ends
(or during your workshop).
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If you want people to practice creating
real surveys during the workshop, schedule a computer
classroom or ask potential participants to bring
laptops; they could pair up with colleagues who don't
have accounts.
Introduction
to workshop [this text can also be used to publicize the
workshop]:
In your courses do you ever ask students to engage in online
discussion? to work on homework or other projects together
online? Do all of your students participate
effectively in these online interactions? 80% 50% fewer? If
the figure is less than 100%, that can be a problem for all
your students, since every student can potentially benefit
from the participation of each student. And we know from
research, that collaboration among students usually improves
learning.
"The goal of this brief workshop [or series
of workshops] is to help
you learn how to increase that participation rate by using
feedback to identify barriers that are slowing or blocking
student participation in online discussion and
collaboration."
Workshop Web
site (steps for participants) |
