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The Goal of This Template
l The Item Bank l
Who Should Use this
Template l
How to View This Template l
How to Use This Template l ARQ
workshop on how to use this Tool l
Other Flashlight Templates and
Item Banks for Faculty
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materials are for use only by institutions that subscribe to
The TLT Group, to participants in TLT Group workshops that
feature this particular material, and
to invited guests. The TLT Group is a non-profit whose
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we invite you to
join us, use these materials, help us
continue to improve them, and, through your subscription,
help us develop new materials! If you have questions
about your rights to use, adapt or share these materials,
please ask us (info @ tltgroup.org).
There are
dozens of barriers that might inhibit or prevent a student
from taking part in an online discussion or working in a
team online to do a project. This survey template (ZS43546)
is designed to give faculty and support/development staff
information to help them increase the percentage of students
who participate successfully in online discussion and
collaboration. To learn how to use this tool, read
this web page.
Click here to see materials for a faculty workshop on
how to study and lower such barriers in courses.
The template is an actually a
small item bank including about 50 questions, each of which
deals with a somewhat different barrier to collaboration
online. This set of barriers was identified with assistance
from a series of TLT/Flashlight faculty workshops in
2000-2002. Participating faculty were asked to list reasons
why some (perhaps even one) student in a course might not
participate fully and effectively in online collaboration or
discussion. We identified barriers that might well be
invisible during a course but that, if made visible, could
be lowered so that participation could increase.
Don't ask students questions about problems
that can't be addressed by the person or people who get the
data. Some of the barriers in this template can be addressed
by the instructor alone so, if you're an instructor working
alone on this, include only those items where you can be of
help. Similarly, if you are in a technology or faculty
support group, you should choose only those items where your
unit can help students. We suggest that instructors and
development/support staff work together in order to plan a
more coordinated strategy: perhaps one survey annually for
all students, or a sample of students, about problems that
can be addressed outside courses, and another form that
interested instructors can use in week 2 or 3 of their
courses.
To view this template, open your Flashlight
Online account, create a survey, use the 'template' command,
and "view" template ZS43546, "Diagnosing Barriers to 100%
Participation in Online Discussion, Collaboration."
If you decide to include these questions,
start with a blank survey (no introduction or items), click
on the Template command, go to this template, and click on
its name (not the View button). After a moment all the
items will be inserted into your survey.
There's one piece missing from this
template: the introduction (a bug in Flashlight Online
prevents templates from having introductions). You'll need
to add that manually. We have some suggested text you could
copy and paste into the introduction field of your survey
(and change if you like). The " <br><br>" is a bit of
html. If you paste this block of text into Flashlight
Online, the <br><br> will create paragraph breaks at
those points. You can use other html code, too (e.g.,
<b>boldface</b> to create boldface.
Please fill out this survey so we
can help you do better in this course. There are
several ways in which it’s important for you to work
with other students online in this course
(list at least some of them
here). In order to help you, we need some
information from you. This won't help or hurt your
grade, but if you put your name at the bottom, we
may be able to provide you individual assistance
that could help you do better in this course. <br><br>
Please quickly read the whole survey first before
responding and tell us what's true for you in THIS
course. When we mention a factor such as “I have
problems expressing what I think in writing,” the
only thing we need to writing problems are keeping
you from working successfully online with other
students in this particular course. <br><br>
"Thanks for helping make this a
better course for everyone; I will report to all of
you about what I learn from this survey and how
we've used it to improve the course. <br><br>
We suggest
the following steps:
a)
Estimate or measure current
participation rates in your course before you start, if
you’d like to see later on whether this survey helped
increase that participation rate. For example, if you're
trying to improve participation in online discussions, count
the number of students who have made their presence felt
constructively in the first week of class.
b)
Create a survey containing the
item bank. Which questions probably represent barriers to
participation in your course:
-
that might affect at least one of
your students, and
-
that can be addressed: in other words, if
the survey can tell you which of your students faces
this barrier, you (personally or via the institution)
can probably help them overcome it.
d)
‘Uncheck’ (delete) any item in
the survey that does not meet both of those criteria. Click
“OK” at the bottom of the survey to send your changes to the
server
e)
Make other needed changes – you
can delete other items, add your own items, rewrite the
introduction, etc. After you've finished adding items, you
can also use the html editing feature of Flashlight Online
to alter the appearance of the survey: putting paragraph
divisions into the introduction, for example, or adding a
thank you at the end. For this and other hints about using
Flashlight Online, see our
help sheet (requires TLT/Flashlight username and
password).
f)
Administer the survey. A good
time to ask for student responses might be after the
students have experienced 1-2 online collaboration
experiences, so that they can respond to questions based on
their experience in your course. Explain that you're asking
for this information so that you can help more students do
well in this aspect of the course. "I can't help you unless
you check all the barriers that are affecting your own
participation in [whatever the group activity is]. That's
also why I'd like you to give your name -- I can't help you
unless I know who you are. If, on the other hand, you'd
prefer to remain anonymous, and not get individualized help,
leave that question blank."
g)
Download the data into a
spreadsheet or other format that will enable you to easily
see which barriers are being experienced by each student in
the course. If you don’t know how to do this, use the help
screens or get assistance from the Flashlight Online
administrator at your institution.
h)
Do your best to help each
student deal with the barriers. If many students face the
same barrier, you may want to do some kind of in-class
activity to do deal with it. Otherwise you may need to work
with students one-on-one.
i)
Estimate participation rates
periodically throughout the course. Did the survey, and what
you did as a result, help improve
participation/collaboration? I predict that the survey will
help in two ways: a) directly, by helping you and the
students deal with barriers, and b) indirectly, by helping
convince the students that you believe that such
participation is important for success in the course.
j)
Whether this survey helped you
or not, whether you even finished using it or not, please
send e-mail to Steve Ehrmann (me) at
ehrmann@tltgroup.org and tell me what happened. Did you
find the data helpful? Did you use techniques for dealing
with barriers that were particularly helpful and and that
are worth passing along to other Flashlight users around the
world? (for example, if some students are skeptical about
the value of online discussion or collaboration as a way to
learn, how did you deal with that barrier?) Do you have
suggestions for improving the survey or these directions?
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