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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 series of brief workshops
(i.e., "Tasks") is to
help faculty members
learn how to discover and then lower barriers that
limit or prevent the full participation of some students. The method: a quick survey
to ask students whether (and, if so, why) they each find
participation difficult, followed by some selective action
to deal with some of those difficulties.
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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 twenty students can
exhibit 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
students in different ways. Fortunately, sometimes,
simply discovering the problem is more than half the
effort needed to solve it.
Task 1: (Before meeting with
your colleagues)
Approximately what percentage of your students participate
(fully) in online discussion (or any other repeated
collaborative activity you want to study) now?
You'll repeat this estimate after using techniques you've
learned here; that can help you decide whether doing a
survey like this has helped. Ideally this estimate
should be made before attending the workshop, so that you
can look at course records (e.g., prior online discussion,
statistics from your institution's course management system;
observations of real-time interaction).
Optional: If you have the
time, take a couple minutes of workshop time to discuss how
each participant made their estimate, to see if different
methods were used.
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; then discuss with colleagues.(3-4 minutes)
Task 3:
Learning to use the item bank: "This handout is
a Flashlight Online 2.0 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 questionnaire:
Click here for a
brief step-by-step demonstration of using
Flashlight Online item bank to create such a
survey. (Individuals can do this alone or in pairs,
between workshop sessions.)
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 6A
(Alternative to Task 6): Do your study. Then convene
a brief workshop of your colleagues to discuss ideas for how
to respond to some of the more puzzling barriers you've
discovered. If there are more than three of you in
this workshop, split into small groups and divide some of
the more common problems among the groups. Each group share
as many responses as participants have seen, can discover,
or invent, to its set of problems. [Here
are some barriers to participating in discussion, and
suggestions for how to respond to each of them; they're
part of Carnegie Mellon's "Solve a Teaching Problem" web
site.]
Task 7: Estimate impact and
benefits. Each participant should make a new
estimate of participation.
Each participant should also write about
their experience with this series of brief workshops. 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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