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Preparation l
Introduction (can also be used
to publicize workshop) l Task 1 l
Task 2 l Task 3
l Task 4 l Task 5
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ARQ Modules l ARQ
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"No man is an island,
entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a
part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as
well as if a promontory were, ..." John Donne
Goals for this series of
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.
Task 1: The goal of
this workshop is to learn some techniques for improving
participation in online discussion (or other collaborative
activities online such as peer critique, group projects,
role plays, etc.). To help you gauge whether this
workshop has been useful, begin by recording some notes
about participation in that activity, in that course, before
you change anything. For example, you might rate
participation at 0% if no one is participating at all, with
a goal of reaching 100%. (1-2 minutes)
Optional: discuss your
method of estimating participation with one or more other
people in the workshop. Then, if you like, modify your
method of estimation.
Task 2:
What barriers might hinder or block each student
from full participation? Think
of courses where you've asked students to engage in online
discussion or collaboration. Think of factors that
could have limited or blocked even one student from full
participation. List as many such factors as you can in the
next two minutes.(3-4 minutes)
Task 3:
Learning to use the item bank: "This handout is
a Flashlight Online 1.0 item bank. You can pick questions
from this long list, anywhere from 5 to, say, 20 items, and
survey your students. From this list, select a few questions
whose answers are most likely to help you figure out how to
improve your course: your most important uncertainties about
what your students are thinking. Put a checkmark beside issues that would be
important barriers for at least one student, and where 'you'
could provide significant assistance to lowering that
barrier.
If you have marked more than 20 items, put a "1" beside questions you could
ask in the first week of the term, and "2" beside items that
it would be better to ask in week 2 or 3, after the students
have a better sense of how your course works. Now you've got
questions for two surveys. [10 minutes]
Task
4: Discuss
how to lower barriers.
Pick a barrier that you think you could help
to lower. Write down what you could do. Suppose that 2/3 of your class faces this
barrier? How would you respond? Take 2
minutes to do this.
Now share your answers with your
colleagues, and let them suggest other ideas for responding
to the same barrier.
Task 5: Creating a
Flashlight Online 1.0 questionnaire:
Click here for an 8-minute demonstration of using
Flashlight Online to create such a survey. If there any
glitches with the audio, start over; that usually fixes the
problem.
Task 6: Do your
study, help your students,
and watch to see if participation improves. You might do one such survey on the first day or
two of class, focusing on barriers that would already be
clear to students. Then do a second, different survey a
couple weeks into the term, focusing on issues that would
only become clear by that time (e.g., assignments, what it's
like to discuss issues in this course with students in this
course). See what barriers you can lower. And estimate
the levels of participation week to week. (If you're
not ready to do surveys, be sure to at least do this last
step: record levels of participation in online discussion or
collaboration. This is baseline data that can help you
interpret what you see when you're taking steps to improve
participation.
Task 7: Estimate impact and
benefits. Ask participants to redo
their estimate of participation.
This would also be a good time to have them write about
their experience with this workshop. Did they think it would
be helpful before they started? And now what do they think?
For your institution, and for The TLT Group, it would be
helpful to a) have these comments in writing, and b) create
a digital recording (e.g., 30 seconds to 2 minutes) of the
best comments. Such materials can be helpful for
future faculty who are considering whether or not this
workshop would be a good use of their time.
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